I never wanted to go to law school.
I wanted to write. Crisp poetry. I wrote thousands of poems — in parks on damp benches, on the subway with the rattle of the tracks, in empty halls between classes. I wrote them everywhere and lost them everywhere. The words slipped away like sand.
But the real place I kept returning to was Port Elizabeth at twelve.
On the train from Johannesburg to Cape Town I had a massive fight with the chess tournament organisers. They were cheating for their son. I fought back. They threatened to put me off the train. I kept fighting. My chess coach told my parents I had more courage in my baby finger than most adults.
Then I flew from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth. An air hostess walked me off the plane herself. Into the most beautiful place in the world. I had seen Cape Point. I would one day see Niagara Falls. But something about Port Elizabeth informs my consciousness still.
I was twelve. I didn't know I was young. I met two girls. We talked, we walked, we chased the shadows of the Rabbit band members around the city. My parents and granny were waiting. The sea. I remember standing on the shore, the sea brushing up and kissing my feet, and feeling — without quite putting it into words — that this was forever. Peace.
I didn't know then that the shadow of youth was obliterated by every sunset.
I built perfect scenarios around that peace for forty years.
The vacuum is not the absence of accomplishments. It is waking up and realising you haven't accomplished what you planned to. And because life is finite — the years go by like sand.
Futurizing was born in that refusal to let the scenarios stay trapped forever. It simply asks:
"What is the tiniest, ugliest move I can make right now that honours even one percent of that future?"
One grain at a time, the sand finally started landing in my actual hand.
This site exists so you don't have to wait until sixty-two.
Then let one tiny piece of it touch the real world before the sand runs out.