The Text I Sent Myself Tomorrow

I was eating dinner on a Sunday when my phone buzzed with a text from my own number. Not a linked device notification, not an email-to-SMS gateway — the thread opened inside my existing 'me' conversation where I sometimes send myself shopping lists. It said: wear the boots.

Odd, but phones do odd things; I decided some app had hiccuped. Then I looked at the timestamp and put my fork down. The message was stamped Monday 18:42. It was Sunday 19:15. The message sat there dated twenty-three and a half hours into the future, and my phone had sorted it to the bottom of the thread accordingly, beneath a blank space where Monday would go.

I screenshotted it, obviously. The screenshot's own metadata says Sunday. The message inside it says Monday. I have shown both to two phone-shop technicians who each began confidently and finished quiet, and one of them took a photo of my screen with his own phone, which I found obscurely comforting.