By Olivia Pepper

It’s 2121, and you are now an ancestor.

I will not explain how this happened. For the purposes of this thought experiment, you must simply trust that some essential part of you continued in consciousness after you left the world. I am not going to talk about your death in this essay, so you can take a deep breath (oh beautiful reminder of living!). The time will come for all of us to understand about our own deaths, but that day is very likely not today.

Back to our premise: 100 years from now this timeless and invisible fragment of you is a part of the willow shadow on the riverbank, and part of the tiles on the rooftops, and part of the whisper of starlight glancing upon the mountains of old broken bottles waiting to be made into something new at the glass plant. And the vegetables in the gardens leach from your ashes to make food for those who have come after. You are spread all around. It isn't that you have thoughts, exactly, or that you experience time, or think of yourself as having a name. It’s more like being the sky. You carry no grudges, no resentments, no shame. You are integrated. Even at this moment, a beeswax candle is burning for you in the memory house.

Your generation is remembered primarily as the ones who suffered and struggled and triumphed through the great turning. Before and during the collapse, things were very difficult for us—but we were also clinging to what we had made because we were very afraid, because we had no idea what would happen when the money charms stopped working and because poverty was a threat to us, and because we were afraid of injustice and oppression, and because there were rich men with hideouts around the world who controlled almost everything of beauty.

But this is not a story about the great turning, or about what led to it. You know about the collapse because you are living through it now. You will carry these memories and painful lessons with you all of your life, and when it comes time, you will tell your story. I am not going to speculate about whether we come to face annihilation through war, famine, sickness, drought, climate disaster, or the combination of these. There will be different things in different places. A wall of fire in one city and an immersive flood in another, and neither of them is more gentle than the other. All I am allowed to tell you now is that the tide will change, and that humanity will once again begin to turn the ghosts into ancestors.

Sometimes, in 2121, on Moon mornings, the day's center-person in the round-house meeting speaks in your generation's memory. The oldest living people remember you, and the rest of those that came up in this time a century ago, and they speak about your skepticism and your courage and your guardedness and your resourcefulness, and how you had to be so strong. You are one of the great grandparents, and whether or not you had children or raised them yourself is of no consequence; you are included in the memories of, at the very least, four families—we never know what a difference we make. Plates of spirit food are put out for you in the garden at night; you hover above them, nestled amid the shimmering hairs on a curious moth's thorax. The children often pretend to be you as they run between the crop mounds. They learn by acting out the dramas of history, taking turns being the different sides. The garden crew listens unobtrusively to the games while they twine squash vines around corn stalks, and afterward they may go speak to the mentors about how someone small was playing at being police, and playing at killing. Thus the mentors listen to the scripts the children use, and facilitate discussion based on the play. The mentors then go to see the scholars in the old barn, to talk about what comes next. The scholars are examining some texts recently discovered in one of the investigations into the corrupted cache of digital files (what one of the historians calls "Alexandria'' even though they know it was properly called "the cloud") for the mentors to use in their teachings; they are discussing what from the collective trauma of the past might need careful attention in sharing with the young ones.

But that's not where we are going today. Today, in the early dewy morning on a day in the season once known as springtime, you settle onto the brow of a sleeping youth who has gone out to try to learn something from the chill air. The dawn wind rustles the condensation catchment units. It will be another hot day. The youth are dreaming, which is what they wanted. They went to sleep under blurred stars asking for guidance. They are dreaming of a condominium building whose outer wall has been lifted away by the spirits of dreamtime. There are many levels and on each level is a private dwelling, like what you may remember as a dollhouse. The youth can see electric lamps and mass-produced furniture and television screens and deadbolt locks and tangles of wire and laptops and too many shoes in a little room just built for too many shoes. On the 8th floor, you are there, attached to your old familiar body. You are lying in one of the beds, and you are awake, staring into the little rectangular jewel box that connects you to the outside. The tiny symbol squares on the glass screen open up into worlds unto themselves. Different ancestors in digital masks dance and laugh and sing along to old songs. Streams of words and pictures flow uphill as your finger traces the feed. You are by yourself. You do not know what to do. Lots of your connections are also lying in bed in the middle of the night looking at the bad news in the information boxes. You are tired and you want to sleep; you are scared and you want to be held. You feel too close to everything and yet so far removed. There's a gunshot, there's a car alarm. You are suddenly so sad. You're going to be forgotten, you just know it.

In 2121, the youth wakes up in the dew beneath the cottonwood tree. They stretch and gaze up startled at the fading stars. In the gardens, someone is singing. The youth knows what to do; they go first to the memory house and find a little clay bowl. Then to the beekeepers who sleep overnight by the beehives and provide a small gleaming lump of honeycomb. The youth goes to the dairy, where someone they have a crush on drenches the honeycomb with goat's milk. They go out to where they had the dream and they nestle the little bowl among the roots. They remember you.

Bio:

Olivia Pepper is a writer and practicing mystic currently residing on unceded Tiwa land in Northern New Mexico. Olivia is a mixed-heritage spirit worker in astrology, herbalism and Tarot with roots on multiple continents, whose primary objective is cultivating ancestorship. While sometimes running the risk of presenting as dour and serious, Olivia also enjoys things like dusting knuckles with dandelion pollen, playing with kittens and watching Star Trek.