Return Address

The first letter arrived on a cold day in February with his own handwriting on the envelope and no return address.

He opened it assuming it was something he'd mailed to himself and forgotten, the kind of thing he did sometimes, a reminder or a document. Instead, it was two paragraphs.

Don't take the contract. I know it looks clean. It isn't. The client's name will be in the news by July and you don't want to be attached to it.

Call your brother. Not for any reason you can think of. Just call him.

He read it twice, then he turned the envelope over, looking for a postmark. There was one, but the date on it was eight months from now.

He put the letter in his desk drawer and tried not to think about it.

He thought about it constantly.

He passed on the contract he had been mulling over, which was difficult because it was a good contract and he needed the money. He called his brother, which was awkward because they had not spoken in a year and his brother seemed surprised and a little wary. They talked for forty minutes about nothing in particular. It was fine. It was better than fine.

In July, the client's name was in the news.

He went back to the letter and read it again. The handwriting was his. The phrasing was his. There were two spelling quirks that were specifically his, things his spell-check didn't catch because they were close enough to real words.

In August a second letter arrived.

He sat with it unopened for three days.

He was afraid of what it would tell him and equally afraid of what it wouldn't. He had started to understand that whoever was sending these had made choices about what he needed to know, and those choices implied other things he was not being told, and he did not know whether that was mercy or something else.

He opened it.

There are only two more after this one, it said. I'm sorry I can't tell you more. At a certain point I decided some things are better arrived at on your own.

You're going to be okay. I mean that literally.

He sat with the letter in his hands for a long time.

He believed it. He didn't know why he believed it, given that the rational response to receiving letters from his apparent future self was probably not simple comfort, but he believed it. He was surprised to find how much he had needed to hear it, and he sat there in his office in the February light and let himself believe it for as long as it lasted.