The Future I Couldn’t Imagine

Every now and then, I catch myself looking around my life for no particular reason.

Usually it happens on a Saturday morning. I’ve got a cup of coffee in my hand, the house is quiet, and I’m trying to convince a blinking cursor that it would really like to become an essay. Nothing remarkable is happening. Maybe that’s exactly why I notice it.

A few weeks ago, I found myself doing exactly that. I took another sip of coffee, looked around the room, and had one of those thoughts that seems to arrive without warning.

I wonder what sixteen-year-old me would think if she could see this.

Not the podcast.

Not the blog.

Not any of the things that sound impressive when someone else says them out loud.

I wondered what she would think about an ordinary Saturday morning.

I have a feeling she’d be confused at first.

She’d probably look around wondering where the corporate office was. She’d ask why I wasn’t living in Chicago or New York, and she might even be a little disappointed that Paris never entered the picture.

When I was sixteen, those cities covered the walls of my bedroom. Paris. New York. Chicago. Somehow Michael Jackson fit perfectly into that collection, and at sixteen it all made complete sense. Those posters weren’t really decorations. They were windows into the future I thought I was supposed to want.

Somewhere along the way, I became convinced that adulthood meant a corporate career in a big city. I never gave much thought to what kind of executive I was going to become, but television and movies in the 1980s made it look like a perfectly reasonable plan. Apparently all I needed was a briefcase, shoulder pads, and somewhere important to be before nine o’clock every morning.

It makes me smile now because I wasn’t dreaming about the wrong future.

I was dreaming about the future I had references for.

Looking back, I think that’s all any of us ever do.

Anyone who knows me knows imagination has never been in short supply. Even as a kid, I could disappear into music, books, and daydreams for hours. But imagination has to build from something. It grows out of the stories we hear, the people we admire, the lives we see around us, and the examples we quietly collect without even realizing we’re collecting them.

Those examples matter more than we realize.

At sixteen, I wasn’t imagining a wife because I had absolutely no interest in marrying a man. That much I already knew. It wasn’t rebellion, and it wasn’t confusion. It was simply true.

But I also wasn’t imagining spending my life with a woman.

How could I?

I grew up in the epitome of small-town America. The stories around me all looked remarkably similar. Boys married girls. Families went to church. People followed the same familiar path into adulthood, and no one ever seemed to question whether there might be another one.

I didn’t even know the word “lesbian” until I was eighteen.

That single fact explains more about my teenage years than almost anything else.

People have occasionally asked me whether I imagined marrying a woman someday.

The honest answer is no.

Not because I didn’t want to.

Because I had never been given a reason to believe it was possible.

You can’t picture a road you’ve never seen.

You can’t imagine a future you’ve never been shown.

So I built my dreams with the references I had.

I don’t feel sad for sixteen-year-old me when I think about that now.

Mostly I feel tenderness.

She wasn’t dreaming too small.

She wasn’t lacking courage.

She wasn’t lacking imagination.

She was simply trying to build a future from a set of blueprints that didn’t include anyone who looked like her.

She wasn’t imagining the wrong life.

She just hadn’t met the people who would change her imagination.

For a while, I kept following the plan I had imagined for myself.

College.

Music.

Classes.

Work.

Like most people in their late teens and early twenties, I was focused on whatever was directly in front of me. There were papers to write, music to practice, jobs to work, and enough uncertainty about adulthood that worrying too far into the future didn’t seem especially productive.

Then one ordinary afternoon, my imagination quietly changed.

I was working in the music library at the university when a mutual friend stopped by and introduced me to someone they thought I should meet.

I can still picture that afternoon as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.

The music library had its own rhythm. Shelves filled with scores, method books, recordings, and decades of musicians leaving little pieces of themselves behind for someone else to discover. It was a place I loved to be, and that day had begun like countless others.

Then she walked in.

I remember looking up from what I was doing.

I remember what she was wearing.

I remember the way she smiled.

More than thirty years have passed, and somehow that moment is still sitting there in perfect focus.

Our mutual friend made the introductions, and we started talking.

If someone had been standing nearby, I doubt they would have noticed anything remarkable. It wasn’t a movie scene. There wasn’t dramatic music playing in the background. No one was writing the script for a great romance.

It was simply two people having a conversation.

But something about that conversation settled me almost immediately.

There was an ease about her that made me feel at ease.

There was a kindness that didn’t ask me to become anyone other than who I already was.

Without even realizing it, I stopped thinking about how I was coming across.

I simply talked.

People have asked me over the years if I believe in love at first sight.

I’m still not sure I do.

Love, at least in my experience, isn’t built in a single afternoon. It’s built through ordinary Tuesdays, shared meals, difficult conversations, laughter that catches you completely by surprise, and choosing each other over and over again.

But I absolutely believe in recognizing someone who is going to matter.

That’s what happened that day.

I didn’t know she would become my wife.

I didn’t know we’d build a home together.

I didn’t know we’d spend decades encouraging each other, laughing over wonderfully ridiculous things, or discovering that the ordinary parts of life would become our favorites.

I knew something much simpler.

I liked who I was when I was with her.

Looking back, I don’t think I recognized my future that afternoon.

I recognized home.

At the time, I couldn’t have explained why that feeling mattered so much.

Now I think I understand.

For most of my life, I had been building my future from borrowed references. Movie characters. Television shows. The expectations of the world around me.

Then, without even realizing it, I met someone who gave me an entirely new reference.

Not because she told me who to become.

Not because she showed me a perfect life.

Simply because, for the first time, I could see someone beside whom I wanted to build one.

Everything didn’t magically become easy after that.

Life rarely works that way.

There were still decisions to make. There were still moments when fear crept back in. There were still years of carefully navigating a world that wasn’t always ready to see our relationship the way we did.

But something fundamental had shifted.

For the first time, the future I imagined wasn’t borrowed from someone else’s story.

It had quietly become my own.

These days, my Saturdays are wonderfully predictable.

I usually wake up before my wife. The coffee is brewing within a few minutes, and by the time the first cup is poured I’m already carrying it from room to room, thinking about whatever happens to be occupying my mind that week. Sometimes it’s an essay that’s refusing to cooperate. Sometimes it’s CloneStar. Sometimes it’s a notebook full of ideas that seemed brilliant the night before and considerably less brilliant in the light of morning.

Eventually the house begins to wake up too.

Breakfast turns into conversation, and our conversations have a habit of wandering far away from where they started. We talk about the week, whatever we’re reading, plans for the day, something funny one of us remembered, or a random thought that somehow leads us down an entirely different path. It’s one of my favorite parts of the day because there is never any effort involved. We simply get to be ourselves.

The rest of the day follows a familiar rhythm. I’ll spend time writing or working on CloneStar, music is almost always playing somewhere in the house, and there are errands to run or little projects waiting for attention. Somewhere along the way I’ll decide another cup of coffee sounds like an excellent idea, even though I know perfectly well it isn’t necessary.

By evening we’re usually settling into something simple. Maybe it’s a movie. Maybe it’s Star Trek. Maybe it’s just another conversation before the day quietly comes to an end.

Nothing about those Saturdays would make the evening news.

Most people would probably describe them as ordinary.

I do too.

The difference is that I no longer think “ordinary” is something to overlook.

When I was sixteen, I thought happiness would arrive attached to something big. I imagined success as a destination, a career, or some dramatic moment when life would finally make sense.

Instead, happiness arrived quietly.

It showed up in routines.

In familiar conversations.

In laughter that still catches me off guard.

In creating something simply because I love creating.

In the comfort of being fully known by the person sitting across the table from me.

Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t dreaming about the wrong future.

I was dreaming with incomplete references.

How could I have imagined growing older with my wife when I didn’t even know women like us existed? How could I have pictured writing essays that would eventually find readers I would never meet? How could I have imagined hosting a Star Trek podcast, building friendships around the world, or discovering that creativity would become one of the ways I make sense of life?

Those dreams weren’t missing because I lacked imagination.

They were missing because I hadn’t yet met the people, or found the communities, that would expand it.

I think that’s true for more of us than we realize.

Every one of us is shaped by the stories we inherit, the examples we see, and the people who quietly show us that another kind of life is possible. Sometimes they don’t change us with speeches or grand gestures. Sometimes they change us simply by existing, by loving us well, or by reflecting back a version of ourselves we hadn’t been able to see before.

Maybe that’s one of the quiet gifts of telling our stories.

Not because everyone should want the same life.

Not because every journey should look the same.

But because every honest story becomes another reference for someone else. Another possibility. Another reminder that there is more than one beautiful way to build a life.

I think about sixteen-year-old me from time to time.

Not with sadness.

Mostly with affection.

She was doing the best she could with what she knew. She wasn’t dreaming too small. She simply hadn’t been introduced to all the possibilities yet.

If I could spend one ordinary Saturday with her, I don’t think I’d spend much time giving advice.

I’d hand her an iced ☕️ while I held my coffee, and we’d sit together for a while.

She’d meet the woman who would become the love of my life and understand why one quiet afternoon in a university music library changed everything.

She’d watch me wrestle with a blinking cursor before an essay finally decided where it wanted to go.

She’d hear music drifting through the house.

She’d laugh at some wonderfully nerdy Star Trek conversation that made perfect sense to me and almost no sense to anyone else.

Mostly, though, she’d see something she had never been given a chance to imagine.

She’d see a life built from love, creativity, friendship, kindness, and wonderfully ordinary Saturdays.

Before she left, I don’t think I’d tell her how every chapter unfolds.

Some discoveries are meant to happen in their own time.

I’d simply tell her this.

The future waiting for you isn’t smaller than you’ve imagined.

It’s just different.

And one day you’ll discover that the life you never knew to dream about becomes the one you wouldn’t trade for anything.

Maybe that’s why telling our stories matters.

We never really know who is trying to imagine tomorrow with the references they have today.

If sharing a little of my ordinary life helps one person believe there might be possibilities they haven’t been able to picture yet, then every one of these essays has been worth writing.

I think that’s a pretty beautiful way to leave the world a little better than we found it.