The entry on October 31st told me three things. First: the entries would stop on December 15th, and I should not be afraid of what that meant — it meant the gap had closed, not that anything had ended. Second: there was a decision coming in the second week of November that I would be tempted to make quickly, and I should wait, and the entry for November 12th would tell me why. Third — and this was the part that I read last and sat with the longest — the first journal, the one I had found on October 7th, had not been placed there by the version of me writing from ahead.
She didn’t know where it had come from either.
I went back to the first journal and read it with different eyes. Same handwriting — mine, unmistakably. But if the second journal was the version of me writing from the future, and she didn’t know where the first journal had come from, then there was a third source. Something else, something outside both of us, that wrote in my hand and knew my days in advance.
I lined the two journals up on the table and compared entries for the same dates. The handwriting in the second was slightly looser than the first. Faster, more fluid, the way handwriting becomes when you have been practising it for years. Or when you are copying someone very well but not perfectly.
The thought arrived quietly, the way the worst thoughts do.
I went back to the October 7th entry — the very first one, the starting point of everything — and held it under the good lamp by my desk and looked at the lowercase e. The particular curl that I had always considered unmistakably mine.
It was mine. It was exactly mine. But the pressure was slightly different. The depth in the paper where the pen had pressed. My handwriting, but written by someone pressing more firmly than I usually do. Someone who had learned to copy it so well that the only tell was the effort underneath.
Someone who was not me and had never been me, writing as if they were.
I moved through the rest of October like a person crossing a frozen lake — carefully, testing each step, trying not to think about what was underneath. I followed the second journal’s instructions and did not make the decision that came in the second week of November quickly, and the November 12th entry explained why in terms that made the right answer clear. I stopped trying to find explanations that fit what I knew, and started simply watching.
The second journal’s final entry — December 15th — was longer than the others. It told me that the first journal would not reappear and the copied entries would stop, because whatever had been doing it would understand by then that it hadn’t worked. It didn’t explain what it had been trying to do. It said, simply: You will not know what it wanted. Some things that happen to us are not for us to understand. What matters is that you came through it, and now you know something that most people don’t.
I asked the page what that was.
The ink below was dry and still. No answer came.
It is now December 17th. The second journal’s entries ran out two days ago, exactly as promised. The first journal has not reappeared. My handwriting in the notes app has not returned.
I have been trying to write this down because my therapist suggested it — she uses the word process a lot, which I used to find vague and now find comforting — and because I want a record while the details are still clear.
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