Your future in six words

Here's mine

By Drew Beamer

I am in my childhood bedroom, shielding the makeshift tarpaulin covering my parents’ fragile existence from the menacing weather encroaching them. There has been no time to write. There is no time to write. But I made a promise a few weeks ago to myself, to you, that I would write every week. So here I am writing. Because I have learned that broken promises to myself heal poorly, with ugly scars.

But what to write?

All writers have an open casket of words that didn’t make it. Maybe there is something there that can be resuscitated…

I delve in, my fingers fall upon a near-finished post from 2019 called ‘Your future in six words’. I’m intrigued, excited – I don’t remember writing it, and I could do with knowing my future today.

Here is what I wrote.

---

There is a story, probably not true but gorgeous enough to not get hung up on the details, that Ernest Hemmingway made a lunchtime ten-dollar bet that he could write a novel in six words. After brief contemplation, he wrote his six words on a napkin, passed it around the table, and collected his winnings.

For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.

I’d have paid up. It is beyond perfect. The type of writing that inflames the voices telling you to throw your pens away, as anything you do with them would be an insult to such artistry.  

Fortunately, most people are less dramatic than I, and this sentence has inspired millions to write their own six word stories and memoirs. They make wonderful reading.

I don’t feel six words from me would add much to this oeuvre. And my words are being pulled to the future, not the past. Are six word futures a thing? Google says no.

Time for a break. It’s a cool, crisp, bright, made-for-a-walk day.

An hour later I write these words.

Dreaming to hope, hoping to dream.

---

Back in 2021, I unslouch with a start, confused. I had written this in the faded, halcyon, pre-covid days, six months before I date my hopefulness reawakening. Had I written my future in those six words? More prosaic explanations are likely, but I like this one.  

And I like these six words. I am happy to stay with them and pick up our relationship in 2021.

*****

What is your six word future?

Why not go for a walk and see what your hands come up with? I’ll be waiting to hear, with love and interest.

Yours hopefully,

Nazneen xxxx

---

Yours Hopefully is a weekly experiment in living hopefully. With songs. Why not subscribe and get a post every Sunday in your inbox?

---