Time Sensitive Mail

Beneath the half-finished designs of a wedding dress, beside the discarded plan for a new type of directed explosive, sat a half-finished letter. Ves plucked it from the pile of disorganized chaos, folded it carefully and tucked it into the envelope with the rest.

That left only the final piece of correspondence. She had spent the last six hours determining what she wanted to say. But she wanted to pen it by hand rather than print it or encode it for digital delivery. There was something visceral about writing words on a piece of paper, almost like capturing spoken words and locking them in a cage for further preservation. Besides, these were special words. They warranted special treatment.

With her computer open to the final draft, she set her pen against the top page of her sketchbook, forming the letters with measured loops, dips and dots.

If you are reading this, then I am most likely dead.

Under most circumstances, she would have considered a statement like that both cliché and overdramatic. But in this case, it was the blunt truth.

I should have written sooner. I tried so many times. I tried every media I could think of. Analog, digital, voice. I even started to draw some wild set of sketches, but I could never finish anything. It never seemed just right.

Not that anything about this sounds right. But desperate days leave us little recourse and dramatically highlight our regrets. I would rather this than nothing.

I wish I had met you. Or reunited, I guess that would be the word. It’s all so confusing now. The past and the present, they get so mixed up sometimes, hard to keep them in the proper order anymore.

I’m not sure I’m the same person you knew. I have the same face as that girl. The same eyes and lips and ears and hair, even if most of it looks different. I have the same blood, the same biological building blocks. But that girl was someone else. The person you see when you look in a mirror. They walk away and do something else, something you’d never think to do. And sometimes you watch. You watch and wonder why you didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t do those things. And then you wonder if maybe you did.

That’s what it’s like. That’s what’s stopping me.

That and the insanity. Some combination of right and wrong, time and place brought me to this moment, with the people who know what’s going on and think they can change it.

But there are things left unfinished. And there’s you. I found you. I know about you. I wanted to ask if you knew about me. If you were avoiding me because it was better that way. Or if you thought I didn’t want to know all about it. Or maybe you just didn’t know. Maybe you thought all the same things I thought. And if you wanted to escape it, I couldn’t blame you. I did too, for a long time.

She stopped, lifted her pen and drew a deep breath.

I’m rambling.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter anymore what either of us did or why. There are things you should know. Things you have a right to know, and I’m not sure that you do. In fact, I’m pretty sure you don’t. It’s all here, in this envelope. Or at least, all you need to find and unlock the truth is here.

I’m sorry that I have to be so vague and cryptic. But I think you know enough to understand.

Lately, I’ve been thinking one of us should finish it. Finish what they started. I’ve hesitated because I don’t know my motivations. Maybe I’ve spent too much time with Eddie, I don’t know. I don’t know if I want revenge, or if I feel like their work should be finished. I don’t know if it’s a sense of family pride that drives me or a desire to make sense of the tatters of my life.

I don’t know.

If you read this, then it’s no longer my decision to make. But it would be wrong not to pass on what I found, to prevent you from making the choice you want to make.

There are plenty of ways for me to stop this package from reaching its destination. If I don’t, that means I didn’t come back. I might still be alive. But if I am then I’m trapped in some weird space dimension I probably won’t come back from.

It’s a long story.

It doesn’t matter.

If by some strange twist I return after this letter arrives, I will find you, if you want to be found. I’ll explain in plain words and we’ll make our decision.

If not, then the letter tucked behind this one says everything I probably should have said before, even if I never found the way to finish it.

The last several words would look like mad scribbles to anyone other than the recipient.

Breathing deeply, she folded the paper across the top of everything else in the envelope. She sealed it, stood, and stared at the door for only a few seconds before she departed to make the final arrangements.

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As I mentioned last week, our game group GM gave us this writing prompt. At the end of a session, our characters were about to embark on a journey into the unknown. We decided they had 12 hours before they would make the crossing and our GM asked us to write what each character used that time for. This is how Ves spent hers. You can read Domerin’s here.

My writing partner only has one character in the game group, but if you haven’t already check out what he did with this prompt.

And if you’d like to participate, please leave a link to your response in the comments and I’ll feature it next week!