among your third-grade class, the website was all the rage—the one where you could upload a photo and a few well-chosen words, speak to your supposed self in twenty years, and upload the results online if you so chose (although nobody ever did). some swore it was AI generated, not fully knowing what that meant, while others saw it as a kind of magic. one evening after school, telling your parents you’re only on the computer for the purposes of the all-important Educational Games that they obsess over, you log on. 

he stares back at you, pixelating at the edges. “who is this?” 

“i don’t know,” you reply through the chatbox, afraid to be heard. you clutch your quartzpink headphones for dear life, tiny paint-stained hands straining against cheap plastic. “i’ve never thought about it, but apparently you’re me from the future?” 

“well, i don’t know, maybe we never had a future.” he winks, the screen flecked with static, his avatar looking bright in the wrong places, almost human but not quite there. “to be honest, i don’t really remember you. i think i blocked out all of elementary school.” maybe he’s not a real person. or maybe, more likely, you’re having technological problems. 

“it hasn’t been that bad, has it?” you think about this year, and sure, there are some regrettable moments. the time the girl you thought was your best friend copied off your homework, and you found out she’d been doing it all year. the time a teacher called you by the name on your birth certificate, which you use at home but not at school, and then all your classmates knew you thereafter by the sound of a long, unpronounceable montage, by nails on the chalkboard and unbecoming. and just about every gym class ever—you didn’t know what you hated more, dodgeball, or the gossip in the girls’ changing room after dodgeball. “i mean, you’re okay now, aren’t you? what was your life like?” you flash back to everything your parents have told you about growing up. “did you, like, go to college?” 

“what’s the fun in having me tell you everything?” he shrugs, and he’s beautiful to you, his artificial glow and his voice like smooth honey and the gentle swing in his hips. “you’ll have to figure all that out. but whatever it is, it’ll be different. better. more you.” 

before you can ask anything else, your mother storms in. “sweetie, who is this you’re talking to? he looks a little like you, is this some kind of Zoom Snap TikTok filter? i don’t know what kids are into these days—"

you try to listen, but the screaming of the avatar, the hum of static, drowns her out, or at least you wish it did

mk zariel {it/its} is a transmasculine neuroqueer poet, theater artist, movement journalist, and insurrectionary anarchist. it is fueled by folk-punk, Emma Goldman, and existential dread. it can be found online at https://mkzariel.carrd.co/.