My therapist told me that keeping a journal would help me feel more like myself. She didn’t explain what to do when the journal already had entries in it — entries written in my handwriting, dated three weeks in the future, describing things that hadn’t happened yet.
I found it on a Tuesday. Ordinary Tuesday, grey October light, the kind of morning that doesn’t prepare you for anything.
I should tell you about the journal first. It was mine — I was sure of that. Black cover, soft spine, a small dent in the bottom right corner where I had dropped it on concrete two months ago. I had bought it in August with the intention of writing every day and had managed six entries before life intervened. The last entry I’d written was September 14th, a paragraph about a difficult phone call with my father and a note to myself to buy more coffee.
I opened it on October 7th to write something — anything — and found that the pages after September 14th were not blank.
Forty-three pages of entries. My handwriting, unmistakably. The same particular way I form my lowercase e, the same habit of underlining words when I’m upset. Dated from October 8th all the way through to October 30th — tomorrow, and beyond.
I sat at my kitchen table for a long time without moving, the journal open in front of me, the morning light shifting across the page. Then I did the obvious thing. I read.
The entries were mundane at first, and that was almost worse than if they had been strange. October 8th described a meeting at work where my manager assigned me a project I hadn’t been given yet. October 9th mentioned rain and a blocked drain in the bathroom I hadn’t noticed yet. October 10th was three lines about a film I’d watched and found disappointing.
I checked the drain when I went to the bathroom. It ran slowly. It hadn’t done that yesterday.
I went to work. In the afternoon, my manager called me into her office and assigned me the project. She used almost exactly the words the journal had used — something that plays to your strengths — and I sat across from her with a very careful expression on my face and said thank you and went back to my desk and stared at my screen for twenty minutes without seeing it.
That night I watched the film. It was disappointing.
The journal was not predicting the future. It was recording it. And whatever was writing in it was several weeks ahead of me.
I didn’t sleep well that night. I lay in the dark and reasoned with myself, which is what I do when I’m frightened — I make arguments and counterarguments until the fear becomes something I can file. I told myself I had written the entries myself during a dissociative episode. I told myself the drain had always been slow and I hadn’t noticed. I told myself my manager used that phrase with everyone.
By three in the morning I had talked myself into a version of calm that was thin enough to see through but better than nothing.
Then my phone lit up on the nightstand. A notification from my notes app — I hadn’t opened it. The note it had flagged was one I didn’t remember writing. Three words, timestamped four minutes ago:
Don’t read ahead.
I put the phone face-down and didn’t sleep again until dawn.
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