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.

Monday it rained like a burst pipe. I wear trainers to work, always; boots live in the cupboard for hikes. Standing in the hallway at 7:30 I looked at the trainers, felt exactly nothing mystical, and put the boots on anyway, self-conscious as a man obeying a fortune cookie.

Coming home, the underpass by the rail crossing had flooded to mid-calf. The whole crowd of trainers-and-office-shoes commuters was bottled up at the mouth of it, calculating losses. I walked straight through, dry to the ankle. Eighteen forty-two, more or less exactly — I checked from the far side, because by then my skin was prickling.

No further messages have arrived from me. I check the thread most evenings, the way you check a mailbox in a house where a letter once appeared from nowhere. Whoever I am tomorrow, he only had one thing to say, and it was about footwear, and he was right.