Week 14 - Messages I Forgot to Write

Messages I Forgot to Write (to Myself)

Matthew Ryan Fischer

I killed a little past of myself today. Just a piece. Just a part. I cut it out and wadded it up and threw it away. It wasn’t brain surgery. It wasn’t rocket science. It was just a simple ordinary act of self-destruction. Like a stiff drink and telling myself to forget. Except with the drink you get to forget for a little while and feel the joy of being slightly drunk. This didn’t have any of the exuberance. It didn’t have any of the pleasant escape. It was volitional. Deliberate. Painfully direct and deliberate.

But I did it. I told myself to, so I did.

It was painful. It hurt. It hurt enough that I wanted to stop, to go back, to forget I ever told myself about any of it. But once you start, once you buy in, you can’t back out. You won’t let yourself. You’re all in.

I broke a little bit of my heart in two. I took another person and wadded them up and threw them away. I didn’t tell them why. It wouldn’t make any sense to them anyway. It hardly makes sense to me. How could I expect them to understand that? I have to live with it. That look. That face. That sadness. I’m sure I knew that going in. Still, that doesn’t make any of it any easier.

Now there’s a little hole in my heart where a person used to be.

I didn’t want to, but what choice did I have? I had told myself to do it, and that’s not the sort of thing I can ignore. I knew that it was important and crucial. I told myself it was. Over and over.

I listened to myself. You have to listen to yourself. That’s the only way you have any judgment at all. I trusted my judgment.

I have to trust myself. The whole thing is built on trust. Without trust, it all falls apart. I have to trust myself. It’s the only thing I’ve got.

I’ve learned to trust myself when it comes to these sorts of things. I usually know best.

Trusting yourself can be a difficult thing to do. It takes time. Maturity. You have to be brave, show a little faith. You have to really know yourself. You don’t always know why you’re doing something nor have all the answers to truly understand it. That’s when you have to show more than a little bit of faith.

That makes it a little scary.

I didn’t always trust myself. Not like that. Not totally. Not completely. That came later, after I learned to.

No, the first time, I hardly believed it. Who would believe it? No sane person would instantly believe it. Not when the first letter arrived. Especially when it’s a first letter. But I suppose I anticipated that when I wrote it. I mean, I had been there after all. I understood the fear, the trepidation, the mistrust.

Or I should have at least. I suppose I took that into account. I suppose I will take it into account.

The first letter told me to take a deep breath. It told me to hang on and to show a little bit of good faith, but future me said that he understood that I really wouldn’t be able to do that. How polite of myself, to tell myself what I would or wouldn’t do. But I guess that’s the prerogative of being future me – you know all the steps that came before.

Still, pretty poor bedside manner if you ask me.

Which I guess I didn’t.

I’ll admit that I left me a little bit surprised. Or future me left me surprised. I would have thought that I’d send me some lottery numbers or something useful like that. But future me said in the first letter he sent to me that in the first letter he received, he only received what he was sending me. Future me was just quoting himself, or his future me. Future future me.

I wondered if future me was just transcribing what future future me wrote him, or if he was ball-parking it from memory. Would it have the same result? Could he even have written me something different if he had tried?

He’ll never know. I’ll never know.

Even if I get to the point that I’m writing my first letter, I won’t know what he did or thought or tried in that moment. I’ll only know what I’m thinking or trying.

But I’m me. So maybe it’s the same. I don’t know. Do quantum letters transcend their makers or are they all the same thing, with different points of reference?

Future me said he was worried, he didn’t want to find out. He only wanted to include the things he thought I was supposed to get. Didn’t want to tempt fate or alter the space-time continuum or something like that.

Sounds like I really turned into a pussy somewhere in the near future. I thought I had more balls than that. I guess not. But what do I know? Maybe I’ll try and something will change or something will stop me. I guess I’ll find out.

Time travel communications with the past. Who in their right mind would believe that? I didn’t. But I do. That first letter told me I would. Eventually. I would be a skeptic and I would deny it, but then some of the things I told myself would happen really would start to happen. And once the future starts to unfold like that, who could deny it?

Well, I did. Or I tried to. I said no. I threw the letter away. I didn’t look for any of the signs.

But they came, whether I was looking for them or not. I didn’t notice at first. They were small things. Average ordinary day sort of things. Things that a hustler or charlatan could predict. If I wanted my palm read, I would have had my palm read. But who wants that sort of bullshit? It’s all fake. Look at my expression, gauge my reaction, make suggestions and lead me into giving you the answer.

That’s what I figured the letter was. A scam. Someone was going to pull a scam. A long con. I didn’t stop to think that I had nothing to offer a scam artist. I’m not that rich. I’m not that connected.

Who would bother trying to scam me?

Who would play such a bad prank?

Then the second letter came. And then a third.

I told myself I wasn’t going to read them. But who was I kidding? Not myself, apparently.

I read them and they confirmed things. And the more I read, the more they predicted and the more they confirmed things.

It all seemed pretty up and up. Someone who was claiming to be future me was trying to tell me about my present and my very near future.

I don’t know how it works. I don’t know too much about how these things could work.

I’m not much of a scientist or a philosopher. I would probably call it magic, but I know that just makes me sound all the more foolish. It’s something I don’t understand.

I’ve heard about relativity and gravity and the speed of light. They talk about things like that in books and TV shows and everyone nods and agrees that it means something. It probably does. But probably not what those writers thought it did. Someone smart knew something and those writers knew the words to quote to make it sound like they did too. But it was that smart someone that really knew what he was doing. That smart someone had an idea once and probably did the work to prove it. Or at least prove it was possible. And then the rest of us dumb ones took it for granted and simply believed him. If we were all still in school our teachers would ask us write out a proof and then we would all fail.

Thankfully we’re not in school.

All I know is that the letters happened. Faster than light, wormholes, or whatever. Something sent those letters back to me. Maybe I was traveling faster than light or perhaps the letters were traveling faster than me. That’s a fast letter.

Like I said, I’d call it magic, except, you know – magic isn’t real.

I got a letter that said I would meet her – and I did. Later, another letter told me to break up with her. I supposed I was trying to spare myself something.

I got there… I got to where I told myself I would get to. I got to where the most recent letter said I needed to get to. Why did I need to get there? No answer. No explanation. But supposedly I got to where I needed to go.

I suppose I should write the me of the past a letter. I’d rather write one to the future me that was helping to guide me all this time. But I suppose he knows. He is or was or will be me after all. He knows it took him and me and all of us in between to make this right.

Ah space-time, you fickle bitch.

I should write the letters. I know this. I can tell it’s time.

I don’t want to write the letter.

I’m scared. Scared of what it will mean. If I do write it, it means I’m no longer me. I’m just the past part of future me. Or the future part of past me. But I’m not really me anymore. Me with no ability to control the past or the present or change my future. Everything is preordained. Future me told me so. Future me knows because future future me told him. None of us are making any choices for ourselves. We’re just doing what a tiny piece of paper and the trust in the future told us to do.

How is any of that life? We aren’t living, we’re obeying. Obeying what we think we told ourselves we wanted the future to be. How do we know what we want the future to be? We can dream it, we can live it while it’s happening, but how are we supposed to know what way is supposed to be what way? Future me didn’t give me a hint or a secret. All future me did was trap me into a path that he himself trapped himself into by listening to who he thought was the future of him. He trusted that the future knew better. How the hell can the future know better if all it does is listen to empty promises of fate and destiny?

I don’t want to be a part of that. I don’t want to be trapped into one thing and only one thing. And I certainly don’t want to trap past me into that. I don’t want to make him a role to play. I want him to be him and to feel like he can be him and not just a link in a chain.

What happens if I don’t write the letters now? Does the world collapse under its theoretical weight? Do I cause a tear in the fabric of all reality? Could I see that tear? Humans don’t see as much as we should. Or could. I know that. Would anything look any different at all? And if there was a tear, does it mean everything unravels or does it mean there’s just a hole somewhere? And if there’s a whole, does that mean I could fall through it? And if I fall through it, what’s on the other side?

There are too many questions. Neverending questions.

All I want are the answers.

What I really want to know is why did future me stop writing letters. Or if he didn't stop, why did I stop receiving them?