“We can embrace marriage, hoping to transcend its contradictions, or reject it, hoping to find something better; either way we are likely to be disappointed,” wrote Willis in 1979. This is not an optimistic sentence, per se: it might even be called pessimist. But when I first read it, I felt a weight remove itself from my shoulders. Here is the truth: I am terrified of the freedom of the present. I am terrified of the restriction of the past. I’m terrified of my own future, stretching out before me into a vast, blurry darkness — so terrified that I’ve spent most of my life trying hard not to think of it at all. I want to love someone forever, but I don’t think I want to get married, but I’m scared of ending up alone with nothing to protect me, and I’m scared of being so pessimistic that I miss out on a good life, and I’m scared of being so optimistic that I stop seeing the truth, and I’m scared of being so safe that I end up bored, and I’m scared of living so freely that I end up in danger. I’m so scared, honestly, so scared, and I’m so tired of thinking about it all the time, so tired of fighting to see romantic love clearly through the thicket of all these narratives. Reading Willis did not chart me a perfect path to the future — I don’t think anything can — but it gave me something that I think might be better: the realization that I didn’t have to shoulder the weight of my questions alone.

Born in Budapest Hungary in 1909, Jules Engel immigrated to the US in the early 1930s. He initially settled in Evanston, Illinois where he went to school.

“This is the indigenous anti-future. We are not concerned with how our enemies name their dead world or how they recognize or acknowledge us or these lands. We are not concerned with re-working their ways of managing control or honoring their dead agreements or treaties. They will not be compelled to end the destruction that their world is predicated upon. We do not plead with them to end global warming as it is the conclusion of their apocalyptic imperative and their life is built upon the death of Mother Earth. We bury the ring wing and the left wing together in the earth they are so hungry to consume. The conclusion of this ideological war of colonial politics is that Indigenous Peoples always lose, unless we lose ourselves. Capitalists and colonizers will not lead us out of their dead futures.”