A Future Fortune

I do not want to write tonight. Which is how I know I have to. That is the oldest rule I keep, learned before I knew I was keeping it. I remember when this used to feel like cold water on the face, like a jog in the blue hour before the birds commit to anything.

But I do none of those things, do I? I write instead, every day, and the miracle of moving a thought from skull to elsewhere has gone the way of all miracles you schedule. Daily routine. Fishbones in the throat, stuck.

Life is good. I cannot complain, so watch me fail to. Earlier tonight I had a ridiculous anxiety attack—ridiculous because I'm fairly sure the trigger was a high-fibre supper leaning on [the vagus nerve](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/22279-vagus-nerve), that long wandering wire between [the gut and the brain](https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/the-gut-brain-connection), until the wire misread dinner as danger. Fight-or-flight over lentils. The neuroscientists say the brain is not a stenographer taking down the world as it happens but [a prediction engine, guessing the body's next moment and calling the guess a feeling](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2016.0007). Which means the panic was not a report. It was a forecast. My body told the first fortune of the night, leaned over its own porcelain, and read doom in the dregs of a meal.

An anxiety attack is a prophecy with bad sources. Remember that. It matters later.

My paper journal is soothing, hundreds of entries, millions of words, a warm animal that asks nothing. My public journal sits empty and sad beside this loud blog like an unrung bell. Do I have anything left to say? Not about writing. I have written about writing the way a moth writes about the porch light. Rotating and revolving around the same prayer.

So tonight, a different prayer. Let me read something other than myself. In [tasseography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasseography)—the old art of finding the future in tea leaves—[the handle of the cup represents the querent](https://www.horniman.ac.uk/story/reading-tea-leaves/): the one who asks. Hold that, too. Every cup ever read, someone was standing in it.

## The Boy Who Drank His Future

I have been finishing [*Shingeki no Kyojin*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Titan). It is a very good show, and it is doing to me what all endings do: answering questions I preferred open. Early on, I lay awake sorting the moral philosophies of children with blades. Now the show turns its cards face-up one by one, and the mercy of resolution costs exactly what mercy always costs. The not-knowing was the living part.

Here is the machinery, briefly, for those who haven't watched. The power at the story's centre—the Attack Titan—[receives the memories of the peop