I've been living as if my actions are a note in a bottle to a future that might not exist, Schrödinger's Tomorrow, and I've been in that headspace my whole life, the hovering discomfort beginning in the 1980s when I was 8 or 9 and first understood the Cold War, writing to President Reagan to try to convince him that if there were a nuclear war he would also not have jelly beans anymore, a candy-based case for saving humanity, and in response months later I got a formatted newsletter from the White House about kids and politics that was complete bullshit, and I knew that even then, and I threw it away. I wasn't precious enough to save any of those records of my early activism because that was not the kind of family I was from, not the kind that recognized itself in resistance, and my anger at society was a furtive secret. That was before I started making hand-drawn T-shirts with quotes about the dangers of nuclear war, copying quotes from a library book onto a Hanes shirt from Kmart with toothpicks dipped in fabric paint, and then I wore those under loose flannels to school at a time when I think I was the only political-shirt-wearing person in a place where my graduating class alone was over 700 people. I went to a farm-town high school in Illinois, a massive and pretty authoritarian place south of Chicago without a student newspaper known as having the best discipline in the state, not Evanston at all. At some point after I stopped curling my hair with a curling iron in the late 1980s style, someone carved "LESBO" in the dark green paint of my locker in the hallway near the band room, even though I had a boyfriend on the soccer team. I kept that to myself. I was always afraid about doing my tiny things, leaving hand-drawn flyers in the grocery store about the dangers of dioxin bleach in the paper products and chlorofluorocarbons, but I always did them anyway, compulsed as only a Catholic girl raised on visions of saintly bodily sacrifice can be, like Saint Lucy holding her eyeballs on a platter, the wounds of stigmata as honor, raised that suffering equals love and that justice requires a blood sacrifice. Well, it often does.