The day my wife died, new words bled across a diary I'd sealed away twelve years ago.
*"Hello, thirty-year-old Dominic Delgado. I am you at eighteen."*
I couldn't breathe. Before the shock could settle, another sentence burned into existence, the ink still wet.
*"Amy has already married you by now, right? She has to be."*
*"I'm so nervous. Hurry up and tell me the result. I'm getting ready to confess to her."*
The diary slipped from my fingers. It hit the floor with a sound like a coffin lid slamming shut.
Amy Ware and I dated for eight years. Married for four.
And for those four years, I watched her drown in a loveless marriage with the cold detachment of a stranger. I never once reached for her hand.
Before she died, Amy left me with only two sentences.
"I will always love the eighteen-year-old Dominic Delgado."
"If he saw you bullying me like this, he would kill you."
The memory carved through me. I scrambled for the diary, ripped off the pen cap, and scrawled across the page so hard my hand shook. The letters came out jagged, half-crazed.
*"Don't confess to her! You're a monster! You will destroy her!"*
——
The moment the last word landed, something inside me shattered.
Tears came without warning—hot, violent, blinding. My knees gave out. The floor rose up to meet me, and I stayed there, gasping for air that wouldn't come.
Amy Ware and I were high school classmates. I harbored a crush on her for three agonizing years.
It wasn't until the day I received my university acceptance letter—confirming we'd be in the same city—that I finally worked up the nerve to confess.
That was the day I started this diary.
The sour ache of secret longing. The dizzying sweetness of mutual love. The hot tears of our first fight. I recorded every moment, pen to paper.
Truthfully, I'd forgotten this book existed. Amy was the one who kept it safe all these years.
Sometimes I'd come home to find her weeping over these pages, fingers tracing the words of the boy who used to love her.
I never asked why.
Not until pancreatic cancer put her in a hospital bed did this diary cross my mind again.
"Do you want me to bring it?" I'd asked, standing stiff and useless beside her.
She wouldn't even look at me.
"No. I don't want him to see me like this."
At the time, I thought the illness had confused her. I missed the profound disappointment in her eyes. The way the light behind them had finally gone out.
Guilt clawed at my throat, sharp and suffocating. I gripped the pen tighter, desperate to write more.
That's when I noticed something strange.
This pen was a cheap freebie from the shop where I bought the diary twelve years ago. It had been clipped to the cover ever since. The ink should have dried up a decade ago.
Yet when I pressed the nib to the yellowed paper, it flowed smooth and dark.
*"I'm begging you, don't confess to her! Let her live a good life without you!"*
I bore down so hard the nib tore through the page.
As the final stroke landed, the full weight of my regret crushed the air from my lungs.
But there was nothing I could do.
No way to undo what I had broken.
I curled up on the floor and howled—raw, animal, inhuman.
*Dominic Delgado, you really are a monster.*
*The one who should be dead is you.*
When I finally lifted my head and wiped the grime from my face, new words had bloomed on the page.
*"Who are you? How are you writing in my diary?"*
*"What nonsense are you spouting? Why can't I confess to Amy? I, Dominic Delgado, will never let Amy Ware down!"*
I stared at the page.
This wasn't a hallucination.
This was real.
On the other end of this impossible connection was my eighteen-year-old self.
The boy who had just received his acceptance letter. The boy who was moments away from changing Amy's life forever.
I dragged my sleeve across my face and wrote back, handwriting urgent.
*"I am you at thirty. Believe me. I would never lie to you."*
