LETTERS FROM TOMORROW

I.

Takeshi Tanaka sat in a half-sedated haze wearing a light blue hospital gown. His belongings, gathered into a clear plastic bag, rested by his feet. Steam from his coffee rose in lazy spirals. The murmur of quiet morning conversations filled the cafe.

His finger traced the rim of the cup, feeling the smooth, warm porcelain. His vision blurred as he touched a napkin to his temple. A faint crimson stain revealed that the blood had clotted, but a piercing headache persisted. His apartment keys sat on the table propping up an unopened envelope. The paper was thick, textured, the kind you find in forgotten bookstores. On the envelope, his name was beautifully written in a careful hand he did not recognize.

The clock on the wall read 8:42 AM. He would have been halfway through surgery by now, if not for her.

Three months of strange days and strange nights. The doctor called it "dissociative episodes of asynchronicity." The medical explanation had been delivered with professional detachment: stress causing a sudden onset of hormonal cascades, acute prefrontal cortex disruption, resulting in temporal perception anomalies. Words that explained everything and nothing.

Too much work. Not enough sleep. Not enough living. When would this monotony end, and his life begin. Takeshi would mutter, talking to the reflection in his bathroom mirror at three in the morning - he was thirty-eight years old, eating convenience store bentos for dinner, sleeping four restless hours a night, and drifting through an unremarkable existence in a cubicle. The kind of life that leaves no impression on the world. His reality had suddenly begun to skip like a scratched CD, moments disappearing and reappearing in ways that shouldn't be possible.

The episodes started, the gaps in his memory began to widen. Small things at first - a conversation with a coworker, a film he had watched the night before - then entire days began to feel like blank spaces filled with someone else’s memories.

Then he met Mei. Everything changed. Everything made sense. Nothing made sense.

Meeting her had been like hearing a perfect note in an empty concert hall. An instant of profound, perfect meaning before the subsequent echoes began to reverberate and devolve into a cacophony of questions.

A silent voice whispered to him that this morning mattered. This cafe. This moment. This letter. This piece of her.

He reached for the envelope hoping it might contain some answers to the questions that were starting to gather in his mind.

The paper felt textured, substantial in his hand. He slid his index finger beneath the flap. The first sentence read:

My Dear Takeshi,

When you begin to slip between moments, don’t fight it.

As the words sank in, he felt a strange prickling at the base of his spine that rose to a sharp buzz within his skull, like the coalescing static that precedes a lightning strike. The cafe seemed to dim around the edges, sounds became strangely distant and distorted. Takeshi gripped the edge of the table, as he felt himself being pulled through the tunnel of time.

He opened his eyes and...

The air smelled of salt. Waves crashed below. He stood on a cliff, overlooking a sea that stretched until it met the sky. A fine ash was carried on the wind.

He turned away from the horizon as the wind whipped his shirt and bit his body. He saw a woman smiling with tears in her eyes.

“You’re early,” she said. She was tall, with a silver-streak running through her black hair. Her eyes looked at him with an infinite kindness. He was disarmed and didn’t know why. She wore a simple white dress as diaphanous as butterfly wings. She stepped towards him and extended her hand. In the other, she cradled an urn, small and delicate.

“I don’t, don’t...” he tried to speak, but the words didn’t form. His mouth felt thick, slow.

She squeezed his hand. “You’re doing great,” she said. “The first few slips are always the hardest.”

The world swirled, then it was quiet. Too quiet. The waves went silent. He opened his mouth to ask, to say something.

“Wait, who are --“ but he couldn’t hear the sound of his own voice.

In an instant, the cliff, the sea, the woman - all vanished.

He was back in the cafe, coffee still steamed in front of him. The clock read 8:42 AM.

The envelope still unopened on the table.

II.

“Did you hear me, Takeshi-san?”

Takeshi looked up. A contorted, pockmarked face at the head of a long conference table glared back. Yamamoto, his supervisor, exhaled through his nose, his face hardened as his index finger tapped the laminate tabletop. A silence fell over the conference room, as his colleagues avoided moving, breathing, blinking.

“I’m sorry,” Takeshi said, straightening in his chair. “Could you repeat that, please?”

Yamamoto didn’t answer right away relishing the moment, “I asked if you had finished the forensic analysis of the Nakamura Account.”

“Yes, I will have it to you this afternoon.” Takeshi replied automatically, even though he had no recollection of any such account.

Yamamoto uttered a monoku of directives, “Hardcopy, my desk, 2 PM,” before turning his attention to his tablet and then to his next victim.

The meeting moved on. Takeshi sat still. The room dimmed as a slideshow presentation took center stage. Everyone began to settle into their office chairs. The room felt too warm, the air heavy with a noxious combination of recycled after-lunch exhalations mixed with the chemical smell of dry-cleaned suits.

Takeshi felt shadows moving around him, papers shuffling in the semi-darkness, and detached, withdrawn faces made grotesque by the illumination of laptop screens.

He loosened his tie and steadied his breathing. He felt suffocated. He focused on the city skyline visible through the large floor-to-ceiling windows. As he searched the skyline for his apartment tower, he tried to recall, but he just couldn’t remember how he got here.

When the meeting ended, he went back to his desk. There was a folder labeled Nakamura Account. He opened it, found an analysis in his own handwriting. The words were his, the phrases and formulas his own — but he couldn’t remember writing them.

His computer showed that he had travelled three days forward since the cafe incident. His email inbox contained dozens of messages he had apparently read and responded in that time. There was even a lunch receipt in his wallet - udon noodles with tempura shrimp and a Diet Coke. All of these events resided in the gap of his memory, a blank space where time should have been.

His phone rang. He picked it up.

“Tanaka-san,” said a voice he didn’t recognize. “This is Dr. Miyazaki’s office. You missed your appointment this morning.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, playing along. “Something came up at work.”

“That’s three appointments you missed now, please hold...” the receptionist said, her voice was polite, but firm. Takeshi heard a muffled exchange before another voice came on the line, cool and detached, “Mr. Tanaka, this is Dr. Miyazaki. We’ll need to schedule a follow-up. You understand your condition requires monitoring and consistent treatment.”

“My condition...” Takeshi repeated.

A pause. “The temporal dysphoria,” Dr. Miyazaki said. “Have you been taking the medication?”

“Yes,” Takeshi lied.

“And the episodes? Any more unexpected... slips?”

Slips. The word sent a shock through Takeshi. Slips, not hallucinations. He was being told that what had happened, was real.

“Just one... maybe two,” Takeshi said.

“I see. Keep the journal as we discussed. It will help. I’ve had a cancellation tomorrow at 2:00 PM. Can you make it?”

Takeshi felt something rise in him, a tightness. “Yes.”

“Good. And Tanaka-san,” Dr. Miyazaki continued, “the police have requested a statement about your recollection of events when you were last in our office. Rest assured, that we have added new security measures to prevent any further disruptions. It is imperative that we complete the procedure and monitor your progress going forward.”

The call ended. Takeshi sat there, the phone in his hand as he tried to remember, but there was nothing, just incoherent fragments of the last few days, memories like blurry polaroids. He opened his desk drawer and found a small black notebook. He turned the pages. They were entries filled with his own precise handwriting.

October 3: Episode lasted 5 minutes (subjective time). Destination: Cliff overlooking ocean, unidentified location. Encountered woman with silver-streaked hair. No name.

October 5: Episode lasted 2 minutes (subjective time). Lecture hall. At chalkboard. My handwriting. Lecture notes: Pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. Three students, two asleep.

October 6: No episode. Increased medication as directed.

October 9: Episode lasted 5 minutes (subjective time). Destination: My apartment, but different. Furniture not mine. Jazz music. Woman’s clothing in closet. Someone singing in the shower. Groceries on the kitchen counter. Black cat on the sofa.

October 12: Episode lasted 36 seconds. Destination: Hospital corridor. Nurses discussing chemotherapy. Teenager at vending machine. Chest hurts. Eyes raw. Hands shaking.

He kept turning the pages. The entries continued, documenting “episodes” he had no memory of experiencing. At the bottom of each page were the same words:

If you’re reading this, you’ve returned from an episode and are confused. Don’t panic. Read the letters. They will guide you. There is one in your chest pocket.

He touched his chest and felt a folded envelope. He took it out, about to open it, when it happened again.

The prickling at the base of his skull. The office dimmed around him.

He was slipping again.

III.

The rain came down hard, drumming on the leaves of the jungle. The air was thick with humidity and the scent of wet earth. Somewhere, far off, a bird called out to its mate. A song of ascending notes followed by a complex chromatic trill as thin as thread.

Takeshi stood on a narrow dirt path cutting through the dense vegetation. He was wearing thin flannel pajamas, soaked through. His feet sliding in house slippers were caked with mud.

“There you are,” said a familiar voice.

The woman, the one from the cliff, was standing a few meters down the path. She wore an iridescent raincoat, that shimmered like oil on water. Her silver hair was pulled back in a tight braid. She didn’t seem surprised to see him, she looked relieved.

“Where am I?” Takeshi asked.

“Belize, 2048,” she said.

“I’ve never been to Belize,” he replied.

“You will someday.”

He expressed a short, sharp laugh. “This can’t be real. I’m either losing my mind or dreaming.”

“No, it’s not as simple as that,” she said. She took his hand in hers and the two of them walked back together.

“You’re unstuck. You’re moving through time. Moving between fixed points in your timeline. It’s a rare condition. When it first emerged, it was called temporal dysphoria. The doctors, back then, understood the symptoms, but didn’t fully understand the underlying cause of the condition or its larger implications to the Chronosphere.”

“And you do? Understand it? You understand what is happening?” Takeshi asked, though a part of him wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Yes. A lifetime’s worth of understanding.” She stepped closer, and Takeshi saw her eyes. They were the same as his. “My name is Yuki. I have the same condition. It runs in my family.”

The rain grew heavier, the path getting slick beneath their feet.

“This is 2048.” Takeshi repeated. “I would be...”

“Seventy-seven,” Yuki supplied. “Though that version of you isn’t here. You are. This is your anchor point, not mine.”

“My anchor point?”

“People with our condition have anchor points throughout our timelines where we can exist. Sometimes we’re connected to strong emotional events, sometimes to places of significance, sometimes to people.” She paused. “You and I are connected. That’s why you keep finding me.”

The thunder rumbled overhead, lightning illuminated the canopy. In that moment, he looked down at his hands, they were thin and frail. Another crash of thunder shook the air around them. Takeshi felt the reverberation through his chest.

“I need to get back,” he said. “Back to my time.”

“You will,” Yuki assured him. “You always do.”

She held him close entwining her arm in his. They walked together, the path stretching on, the storm rolling behind them. Ahead, a house stood in the clearing, a simple, concrete structure overlooking the ocean.

“We’re home,” she said. They stepped inside, and the warmth of the fire hit him. It felt familiar. The room, filled with mementoes gathered over a lifetime, was rich with the weight of history.

“Rest here,” she said. “I’ll make tea.”

She draped a quilt over his lap, its weight comforting. He sank into the old chair. It was worn in the right places, where his hands would rest.

He looked out into the darkness as he tried to process everything. Through the large bay windows he could see the thunderstorm over the ocean.

The ocean stretched out before him, vast, dark, endless.

He had always wanted to be near the ocean, to feel the immensity of that infinity, and to feel insignificant against it.

He began to fall asleep lulled by the sounds of the ocean and the storm.

Yuki returned with an ornate tray. Two cups of tea. And an envelope, old, creased, the paper brittle with age.

“I’ve seen this before.” he whispered. “What is it?”

“It’s for you,” she said. “These letters exist at all your anchor points, she wrote this one, years ago.” Yuki explained, holding it out to him. “It serves as a temporal constant, something that she wanted me to give to you at this time and at this place. Each time we slip, the small details change, but the overall journey stays the same. She wrote this letter and many others to serve as guideposts along the way.”

Takeshi took the envelope. It was heavy, significant. It felt like the end of something.

“Read it when you’re ready.” Yuki said. “It will explain what I can’t. What you can’t yet fully understand.”

“Are we... friends in the future?” Takeshi asked, confused.

Yuki’s expression softened. “We’re much more than that, you’ve known me my whole life.”

“Our lives,” she said, her voice low. “All three of us are entwined through time.”

Before he could ask more, the world around him started to fade. The thunder rumbled one last time.

“Wait -“ he called out.

But it was too late, he was already slipping back.

“I’ll be here, when you return,” she said, as he dissolved into the darkness.

Takeshi was suspended in the void. Outside of time. It could have been a second or a thousand years. He struggled to open his eyes against an infinite emptiness. Gradually, a constellation of lights punctured the darkness and he was pulled to a distant pinpoint of light.

IV.

Takeshi stepped into a small town fair in the dead of winter. The sun hit the snow hard, and the light was sharp, almost blinding. His eyes watered from it. He squinted as the purple-blue haze receded and his vision cleared. The cold hit him, a knife-edge cut with every breath releasing a plume of vapor. He deciphered the shapes around him. He stood in a small park, surrounded by young families. The laughter of children - bright and cheerful - carried through the crisp air.

Snow crunched behind him and he felt a tug on his pant leg, a light pull of small hands on fabric. He turned. A little girl, maybe five or six. Her eyes were like his. She wore a red wool coat and matching mittens, a white scarf wrapped around her neck. She stood beside a half-built snowman, its head leaning off-center, the body crooked.

They shared a long moment of silence.

“Is this your first time here?” She said in a voice preternaturally older than her years. He nodded, yes.

She turned and pointed to a small row of hedges beyond the fairground. “After we have hot chocolate, you’ll find me there. You’ll give me a long lecture about children who get kidnapped who never see their families again. I was chasing a rabbit. I was sorry I made you worry and made Mama cry. Remember to stop and get pancakes on the way home, it made everything better. Today was one of my favorite memories from my childhood.”

“You’re my daughter?” Takeshi asked in almost a whisper.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“And you can time slip?” he continued.

“Yes, but I can control it far better. You taught me how to do it. You taught me how to not be afraid. You taught me how to swim through time.”

He took a breath. “I did?”

She nodded again.

“How old are you now?” he asked cautiously.

“Eleven and a half now, but here I’m five,” she replied.

He kneeled down, looking into her eyes. “Am I a good father to you?”

She leaned in close and whispers, “You always ask me that.”

Takeshi closed his eyes. She wrapped her little arms around him, and the warmth of the sun hit him, even through his closed eyelids. He could feel the weight of her embrace, and for the first time in a long time Takeshi felt like he was home.

“Mama!” Yuki squealed with delight. Her voice was that of an exuberant five year old girl.

Mei appeared, walking toward them, balancing three cups of hot chocolate in her arms. Her cheeks red from the cold wind, and her hair jet black against a world blanketed in snow. Her eyes smiled when she saw him.

She knelt down, and all three of them sipped from their cups, finishing the snowman together. The little girl talked continuously, her words tumbling out in a rush - about school, her disloyal best-friends, the unfair amount of homework, and a book she was reading about a rabbit detective. Takeshi listened and took it all in. Until that moment, he had felt as if he had been a silent spectator orbiting on the periphery of his own life. Now surrounded by his family, he had finally arrived at the center.

The sun began to fall behind the clouds. A chill came over him. He felt the pull of time.

“No,” he gasped, trying to fight it, trying to will himself to stay. “Please... not yet...”

But the world began to dissolve. And he was pulled away, away from everything. Away from them.

V.

“Name, please.” the receptionist said.

Takeshi felt lost. “I’m sorry.”

“Name. First, last, and birth date,” she said again, impatient now.

“Takeshi Tanaka, April 17, 1971.”

“First visit?”

“I think so,”

“Fill this out.” She handed him a yellow clipboard and looked past him. “Name, please.”

Takeshi sat in the waiting room. The magazines on the coffee table were old, their corners worn. On the lower righthand corner, faded delivery labels read: “Dr. Miyazaki, Chrono-Center Clinic, Shinjuku-ku, Kabuki-cho, 1-19-1”

He searched the name on his phone. Found an academic paper: "Chrono-Displacement: An Analysis of Temporal Fluidity and its Cognitive Implications." Then the clinic website. The internet connection was bad. While he waited, he looked around.

Everyone looked tired, broken, confused. Some had fresh bandages on their heads. There was a shared stillness. The kind of silence you find at the edge of a dream. Then the stillness broke for a moment.

An old man kept falling asleep and waking up with a start at regular intervals. No one noticed anymore. Takeshi was about to leave when a young woman came in. She took off her sunglasses and he realized who it was.

“Hi Mei, what time is your appointment?” the receptionist asked.

“Ten minutes ago,” she replied.

“Sit down. I’ll tell the doctor. And please fill this out, you didn’t last time.” The receptionist handed her a blue clipboard.

Mei sat next to him. Her pen was dry. She made furious circles in the corner of the paper. It did nothing to revive the pen. Takeshi offered her his pen and in the exchange their eyes met. And in the way that she looked at him, he knew that this was the first time that she had met him. She looked younger now, but her eyes smiled in the same way they did on that winter day.

“Thanks... Takeshi,” she said looking at his name on his form.

“You’re welcome, Mei.” he said, mimicking her.

The old man jerked awake. They both looked.

“Mr. Serizawa does that all the time,” she said. “The poor man slips faster than most. He’s on the express train through time.”

Mei turned her attention back to her paperwork. As she hunched over her clipboard, she gathered her hair behind her ear, revealing a fresh star-shaped scar on her temple.

In the lull, Takeshi looked at his phone, the clinic website had loaded. He watched an instructional video about the surgical intervention for their condition. Takeshi exhaled trying to keep his nerves steady.

“Yellow clipboard. You’re new, huh?” she asked.

“Yes. Everything is new.” Takeshi replied.

Mei saw the look of apprehension on Takeshi’s face. “Thinking of running out of here and never looking back? We all go through that phase, but we all end up coming back to this purgatory looking for a way out.”

A nurse called, “Mei, the doctor will see you now.”

Before standing, Mei took his hand, “If you go, at least now you know, you’re not alone. If you need to talk to someone, we have a special hotline.”

She wrote her name and number on his palm and closed it.

“Bye, Takeshi. See you around,” she said, following the nurse.

Takeshi looked at his palm. She had beautiful handwriting. He knew who wrote the letters now.

Takeshi sat quietly in the waiting room considering his options. The old man kept waking up from his time slips. When the room began to dim, and Takeshi felt a familiar tingle, he knew it was his turn. He closed his eyes, resigned to his fate, as he slipped.

VI.

Takeshi awoke in the same room. Different clothes. Different chair. His palm was clean. No writing. The room was empty.

The nurse opened the door. "This way, Mr. Tanaka. Today's the big day."

He followed the same path as Mei. Changed into a gown. Put his things in a plastic bag. They wheeled him into a pre-operative bay where other patients were sleeping. They gave him something that made him tired.

Takeshi floated in an out of consciousness as he heard the gentle hum and beeps of the medical machines around him. His dreams, his consciousness, and his time slips blended together. He felt that familiar tingle mixing with the cold sedative flowing through his veins.

He had been unstuck for what felt like weeks, though only seconds had passed. In that time, he had slipped between moments with ever increasing frequency: a hospital room where he was waiting in the maternity ward; a university lecture hall where he was a professor at the chalkboard; kneeling before Mei on a cliff by an ocean; a funeral with a closed casket and Yuki — now a teenager — weeping inconsolably in his arms.

Each time, he returned to a present that had continued without him, finding evidence of a life he had lived, but couldn’t remember.

It was as if two Takeshi’s existed - the one who slipped through time, and the one who remained anchored, living a normal life in the gaps between. Four minutes had elapsed, but he had lived decades as he was wheeled down the hallway into the operating room.

In the operating room, he felt the heat radiating from the three overhead lights. He remembered that day building the snowman, that perfect afternoon, a lifetime away. He heard a loud hum. Felt pressure on his temple. Then the hum abruptly stopped and in the periphery, he could hear the commotion of raised voices.

He willed himself awake. Turned to see Mei. She had a scalpel in her hand and had corralled the doctor and assistants into a corner of the operating room.

She bent close and whispered, “Takeshi, I’m getting you out of here, now.”

He went with her. Everything accelerated into a blur, the elevator, the cab, and the ride to the cafe.

At a busy intersection along the way, she paid the driver a handful of crumpled bills and told him where to go. She looked at Takeshi with eyes that knew and loved him. She pressed a letter to his chest.

“I couldn’t let them do that to you, knowing what I know now. I will find you, again, Takeshi, but right now I have to stop them from doing more damage to our timelines.” She kissed him and was gone into the crowd.

The cab drove on. As it began to rain, the faint sound of sirens wailed above the electric pulse of the city. There was a car accident on the way, traffic slowed to a stop, and Takeshi changed out of his hospital gown as the cab arrived at the cafe. The driver looked through his rearview mirror, as Takeshi stumbled onto the curb; in all his years, he had never seen a fare more lost in his life.

VII.

Steam rose from the coffee cup in slow, lazy spirals. The cafe hummed with quiet morning conversations. Takeshi ran his finger along the rim of his cup, feeling the smooth, warm porcelain.

The clock on the wall read 8:42 AM. It was a perfectly ordinary Tuesday in October to everyone around him. But for him, it was far from ordinary, because he knew that it wasn’t the first time he had lived this moment.

He took a napkin and wiped his temple, more from a half-remembered memory than immediate need. The drill had only made a superficial entry. It didn’t break bone, it didn’t enter into his brain, but it did leave him with a tell-tale scar to remind him of this morning. He would look at that scar in the years to come and remember Mei.

The envelope sat on the table before him - unopened, as it always was at this point in the cycle. His name written in handwriting he now recognized as Mei’s.

Memories flooded back — not just of the life he had been living before this moment, but of other lives, other loops. Fragments assembled into an imperfect mosaic of experience: teaching at Tokyo University; raising Yuki; the long years without Mei; and dying while listening to a thunderstorm over an ocean.

Each loop was different in its details, but consistent in its overall architecture. Each contained the same people, the same love, the same loss, and the same fundamental truths discovered and rediscovered.

He opened the envelope, reading the letter for the first time in this loop:

My Dear Takeshi,

I have to keep this short because I don’t want you to slip before you finish reading this letter.

When you do begin to slip between moments, don’t fight it. The more you resist, the more painful the transitions become, and the less control you’ll have over your destinations.

By the time you read this, we will have already met several times from your perspective, though many more from mine. I know you’re confused and frightened. I was too, when it started happening to me.

What you’re experiencing isn’t a mental illness. It’s not a hallucination. It’s a rare genetic condition that affects your relationship with time. Your consciousness becomes untethered, moving along the fixed points of your timeline like a passenger wandering through the compartments on a moving train. There is no cure, but there is adaptation. You will learn to live between moments, to build a life from the fragments.

You’re not alone. I have the same condition and so does our daughter. There are others as well and, in time, all our lives will intersect.

We’ll find each other, again and again.

I’ve lived with this condition for fifteen years longer than you. The operation I underwent accelerated what we all ultimately experience: an unraveling of our consciousness and a rewinding of our lives. If you’re reading this, I was able to stop them from operating on you. I wanted to give you more time with our daughter. Kiss her often for me. And know that somewhere ahead and behind, across the sea of time, I am waiting for you both.

Mei

Takeshi looked up from the letter. The coffee had gone cold. The cup no longer warm. He sat still with the weight of the knowledge of what had happened and what was to come.

As the cafe dimmed around him and he began to slip into another moment of his life, Takeshi felt not fear, but hope for what would come next. Hope that he would see her again.

VIII.

A loose syncopated rhythm drifted from the vintage Bang & Olufsen speakers, low and easy, an echo of something Takeshi thought he recognized. Coltrane, maybe. The record wasn’t his; it was hers. She had given him that, she shared so freely the things she loved — jazz on a lazy afternoon, Truffaut movies at midnight, early morning walks through a still slumbering city - She shared a thousand small things over the years that gave him a glimpse of the world through her eyes.

The apartment was awash in the golden afternoon light, reflecting from the red brick across the street. It was his apartment, but everything was different. There was furniture that he didn’t own artfully arranged in the living room, on the windowsills were real plants - not plastic, and atop the sofa a cat, black with amber eyes, sat there, watching him like he didn’t belong.

The refrigerator beeped, as it always did when left open too long. He stood there over a half empty bag of groceries, trying to arrange things the way it was supposed to be now. His fridge, back in his time, was a graveyard of styrofoam containers and half-eaten take-out. But this wasn’t his time. This wasn’t his life.

He caught sight of the photos on the fridge — gift-shop magnets holding memories. Memories that weren’t his. His life, it seemed, was right there in the pictures, and not yet lived, a different life than he ever imagined.

"Could you stir the sauce so it doesn’t burn?" Mei’s voice broke through his thoughts. He saw her from the corner of his eye, a quick flash of movement as she walked from the bathroom to the bedroom. She was different. Maybe just a little older. Maybe more.

"Yes," he said, almost too quickly. "Yes, I can stir. No problem." The black cat jumped on the counter, coming closer, curious.

On the fridge door, beneath the photos, was a dry-erase calendar. October 23. What year? The weekend had a golden star on it, shining like it meant something important. He didn’t know what it meant, but he felt it. He felt it in the way the air shifted when she walked into the room.

She came in wearing a bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a towel, her face glowing. He looked at her and knew, without asking, what the star on the calendar was for. She looked deep into his eyes and knew instantly, that he was not the Takeshi from this time.

“You’re here, she said, “I was hoping you would be. It’s been so long since that cab ride, for me. A lot has happened since then.”

She had aged in a graceful way. A little silver in her hair now, a faint star-shaped scar on her temple, the one that had been fresh and raw when he first met her.

“When is this?” he asked, his voice quiet.

"2012," she replied, taking over the stirring of the sauce. "We’ve been together for three years. Your anchor point here is strong. You visit often."

"This is my... our home? And this is our cat?" He looked down at the black cat, now rubbing against him.

“Yes, this was once your apartment, but it is now our home, and no, Schrödinger is, and always will be, my cat. But he does like you very much, as do I.”

She unpacked the groceries — vegetables, fish, a bottle of sake. Ordinary. Simple. Domestic. Takeshi felt it all settle over him, that quiet mix of the mundane with the extraordinary, but reconciling the two threatened to pull him under.

“You’re so calm about all this,” he said, watching her. “How do you do it?”

She shrugged. “I’ve had more time to adjust. I’ve met many versions of you by now - from the confused young man at the clinic years ago, to the dedicated professor you’ll become years from now, and everything in between.

“Professor? A professor of what?”

“You try to understand and find a framework for our condition. You desperately want to find a cure for Yuki, you always try, but in time, you accept the inevitability of what will happen, instead of fighting it.”

Takeshi walked to the window, looking out at the Tokyo skyline finding that it was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

“The letter,” he said. “I read it. Thank you.”

Mei came to stand beside him. “Sometimes knowing a few steps ahead helps. We dance together through time, Takeshi. These small moments, we have to make the most of them.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck, and for a moment, they swayed gently to the music, as if nothing else mattered.

“I’ll be going soon,” she said softly. “And soon you’ll have to take the lead... But make sure this doesn’t burn.” She gestured to the saucepan on the stove. “Stir, clock-wise, counter-clockwise, I don’t care, just don’t forget to stir,”

She paused, and kissed him. “And one more thing...” She said as she held his gaze.

“There is another letter for you," she whispered. "It’s on your desk. I’m pregnant. If you haven’t noticed." She placed his hand on her belly.

“I noticed,” Takeshi smiled.

"And unlike Schrödinger, she is yours."

"What do I do?" he asked, his voice barely more than a whisper.

“Think of life like a book,” she said. “Most people read it front to back, page by page. We jump between chapters, read parts out of order. But all the words are there. All the meaning, all the moments, they still exist.”

“You’ve said this to me before, haven’t you?” he asked.

“All the time. More times than you could imagine.”

The cat had moved to the windowsill, watching the darkening sky, tail twitching like it knew something was coming.

Takeshi felt Mei’s body stiffen slightly. And he knew that this version of Mei was slipping away, moving to her next anchor point.

"I’m so freaking hungry," she said, going back to the kitchen. "Want to set the table while I get the spaghetti ready?"

"I love spaghetti," he said, setting the plates.

"I know, me too. And I have a feeling she will, too,” she smiled.

“Would you turn on a couple lights so we don’t eat in complete darkness? You’re domesticated now. Feral Takeshi eating by moonlight is a thing of the past. New and improved Takeshi is here to stay,” she said with a smile.

Takeshi walked through the apartment turning on a large floor lamp. The light filtered through a large oval cocoon of rice paper. It gave the apartment a warm, comforting glow. He walked to his desk and saw the letter tucked in his black notebook.

He read the letter, smiled to himself as he exhaled, and carefully placed it back in its envelope. He opened a drawer and saw hundreds of letters all neatly organized by date. She had written all of these for him. He looked at Mei cooking in the kitchen swaying to the music. She was both the particle and the wave. In that moment, he knew he was not alone on this journey through time, she was always there with him. She was his constant.

They ate together, and as the lights of the Tokyo skyline lit up against the gathering night, they talked and laughed for hours. Mei told him about the years they had shared. And he told her about how years from now, on a crisp winter afternoon, the three of them will drink hot chocolate and build a snowman together.

“What should we name her?” Mei asked.

“We named her Yuki,” he replied.

Later, they lay together, holding each other in the darkness. He kissed her forehead, feeling that familiar tingle at the base of his skull. The last thing he saw before the world dissolved was Mei’s eyes - patient, knowing, filled with a love he hadn’t yet earned, but somehow already possessed.

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