A letter to the person you were two months ago

Two months ago, in a rented room lit by a single bedside lamp, he typed a letter to himself. He wrote it at his lowest, hands not quite steady. When it was done he saved it and sent it to no one — because there was no one to send it to, and because some things are tiring enough to say once.

Inside were the three things he was most afraid of. He still remembers what it felt like to list them: they seemed large enough that he was certain not one of them could be survived. Two months later he read the lines back, one at a time, and then just sat there. All three were already behind him. There had been no day he'd cleared them in any triumphant way, no one to tap his shoulder and tell him. They had simply passed, and he was the last to notice.

There was one page he'd been avoiding — the page full of other people's names. Back then he wrote them down to work out where he stood: who had what, how far each of them had gotten, and how far behind that left him. Reading it now, he couldn't put a face to most of them. The contest he'd been losing for months, it turned out, had no other entrants.

The heaviest line sat near the end: this isn't home. He wrote it while his suitcase still stood in the corner, unpacked, because unpacking would have meant staying. The day he reread the letter, there was rice cooking in the kitchen — a smell so familiar by then that he'd stopped registering it. There had been no evening when he decided this place counted as home. At some point he had simply stopped counting the days until he left.

It isn't this place that changed. I just stopped counting the days home.

Nothing is resolved. He still worries, still wobbles. It's only that today he saved the letter instead of deleting it. And you — if you opened what you wrote two months ago, would you find someone weak, or a list of things you've already walked through without noticing?