When I was little, I would write notes addressed to 'future me' telling him about my thoughts and wishes for the future so that he might remember to actualize them. I would seal them in a business envelope and print my address, accompanied by an instruction for the postman in red marker: "DELIVER IN 7 YEARS" so that it could get to me at a strategic moment, perhaps as I'm about to make a critical decision which might benefit from the moral perspective of a more primordial self. I had a very serious attitude about this ritual, but my parents thought it was adorable and hilarious. They didn't even bother to tell me that stamps were required. I stopped writing these letters when I turned 13.
I got the first letter when I was 11. I had written it when I was four. It said, "Hi Zanick, be nice to everybody. You have to be the President one day, and being nice is your job." I thought it was my parent's sick attempt to humiliate me for their amusement, and I killed the family pet in retaliation.
The second letter came two years later. This one was different, with the foundations of social maturity coming into the foreground of my past intellectual development, "Zanick, I hope you're still playing baseball. When we grow up, you'll play for the Cubs. You'll be a Senator, and you'll be married to Abby from next door." Abby moved the Summer after I wrote that letter. I don't believe in Senators. I quit little league after reading that letter. I thought it was really weird that my parents wanted me to keep doing something that I liked. They got divorced, so they deserve an unruly child.
More letters came over the years. I won't go over them all now. My priorities were very typical, so I'm sure you can imagine what trivial things I might've written. I arrived at the conclusion that my parents had managed to come to an arrangement with a very fucking stupid postal office worker whose job is to make little queers' wishes come true through a risky exploitation of our tax dollars. I came to accept that the letters were from a younger me, but I still thought of them as ultimately useless and embarrassing.
The letter I never expected arrived in my first year of college. It was delivered to my dorm. Under the door. There was no return address, but the handwriting was mine. I hadn't set up address forwarding with the post office, so I didn't know how it found me. I only asked, "How is our sister doing?" followed by instructions to send the response to a PO box and label to deliver it seven years ago. Figuring it was an elaborate prank from my roommate, I simply wrote on a piece of paper, "Sister is good. I killed her, cut off her face and started wearing it and imitating her voice wherever I went. People love it." I addressed it to the PO box and brought it personally to the post office. I thought it was funny, now that my disgusting parents weren't behind it. I had no reason to suspect that this could cause me trouble later on, and I didn't get another letter until a few months ago.
The handwriting was mine. No return address. "DELIVER IN 7 YEARS" was stamped on the front. My reply had been taken as a command, in both poetic abstraction and in the most literal, visceral sense possible. There were photos included: a ghastly slideshow of my evil sister, decapitated and sewn back up, limbs reversed and showing signs of deterioration around the stitchings, along with a final Polaroid of me wearing her face. Frightened, I called my sister immediately. She answered, so I quickly called her a faggot and hung up. This was just an unbelievable Photoshop job. I typed in large font, "What the fuck is wrong with you? Don't contact me again or I'll call the police" and I printed that message, and then I sent it to the same PO box.
Six weeks ago, another letter came. This time, I was mocking me for having failed to dispatch of my horrible sister, that I'd killed her in another life and supplanted her role in the family. I'd graduated high school early and gotten into a good pre-law program on a scholarship and scored a crucial internship at a Chicago firm. I became the lawyer she'd always dreamed of being herself; I took her life and I lived it exactly how she would have, and every day it gets me off like no drug in the world. I get to be superior, just like her; entitled and proud and presiding as queen amidst the chaos. I was shallow, derisive, and venomous. All the things that tormented me in my youth, I had appropriated to create my own permanent, enlightened narcissism.
Every day since I've received a minimum of three letters from me, seven years ago. All of them ridicule my weakness, my diligence and diplomacy. All of them promise my destruction, and I assure me that there is a way to breach the thin barrier between my selves and that there would be no stopping me. I include pictures of buildings in our town being demolished, which I can simultaneously visit because they're still there for me, and I think he means them to serve as proof that we, in fact, occupy two different worlds. Sometimes the envelopes have hair and fingernails in them. More recently, he's been predicting shootings in the city to demonstrate his growing awareness of our side. I live in two universes, and I from one am trying to kill me in the other.
I've written a series of letters asking for help and advice, but this time with the instruction, "DELIVER IN 7 YEARS". I await a reply.
