Sent from: 2/8/2026 (32 years old) To: 9/24/2004 (11 years old)
Dear Cody,
You dreamed this message, and now you’re laying in bed, having just woken up. Already it’s probably starting to fade as the inarguable solidness of the logos-ordered waking world reasserts itself. You love the tiny threads of light that stream from the pinhole craggles in your wooden bedroom door; the tree grew knots to let it in for you.
Focus though: I need you to remember this.
I am you, twenty one years from now. I’m writing you because I’ve betrayed you. I’ve failed to become the person you knew you could be, failed to uphold your ideals. I want to explain that I’m sorry. Beg for your forgiveness. But more than anything, there are important things I need to tell you.
Yesterday was your first day of 6th grade. It felt weird and alien. You’re in a new town, a new house. You don’t know anyone. I know, I remember.
Life plays out in chapters, and you’re at a transition point. From here, everything will start to change. Cause and effect cascades will begin that echo through your whole life. Eventually, they will turn you into me. That’s why I’ve written this and sent it back in time, into your dreams.
If there’s magic in the world, there’s magic in dreams. You’ve always had the sneaking suspicion yours were in some way premonitory. In the cabinet there’s a picture you drew of a monster destroying a skyscraper based on a dream you had. Fire and dust enshroud the structure and people fall from the windows. It’s dated 9/10/2001.
You used to have a recurring dream where you climb a ladder that stretches all the way into the clouds. When you reach the top, there’s a slide, like at a playground. You sit down, ready to go, but then hesitate. Beneath the excitement there’s a small unutterable fear that maybe it will be more down than up. Or worse, that you might fall off. The dream always ends before you push off.
Each chapter of life is defined by a philosophical question, the lack of an embodied answer to which effectively bottlenecks you in some way. The first one, what life fundamentally is - a place of meaning or a place of matter - ends up being perhaps the defining question of your life. Your bed sheets still have Star Wars characters on them. You don’t have the words to articulate these questions yet, but they weigh on you nonetheless.
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I’ve come full circle on my map of the cosmos. When I was you I thought I could feel the mysteries around the edges, and then as I got older I let scientism’s project to render the world mundane convince me to set that aside for more adult ontologies. Life can be so perfectly wicked. Torture you in ways that feel impossibly tailored and elegant. Little by little it convinces you to betray the things you believe in. Now though, after all this time, I am returning to where I came from.
Sixth grade is the year that you start taking your guitar playing seriously. It’s the year you start playing football and accruing tiny neurological injuries, and the year things start to get hard. You’re at the top of the slide now.
There’s a notion in physics of the holographic universe - that everything we perceive as ontic and three-dimensional is just a projection of a lower-dimensional surface, a longwinded playing out of what in its true form is a distant folded point. You believe in the Holographic Life. The idea that, in some substantive way, real life happens on your death bed. When there’s nothing but your memories, now, for the first time, a complete canon, when the story is fully written and ready to be read. Everything prior is just an Occurrence-at-Owl-Creek-Bridge projection. You decide at some point to optimize your life around minimizing the regret you feel when you take your last breath.
You’ve always had a very clear idea of the arc your life should take. There’s a correct timeline. And right now, when you’re young and your brain is still made of the stuff of the firmament, you can feel it, and when you walk toward it, it comes true.
When you’re 14, you go to Heritage Square with Dad and watch Whiskey Rodeo, Flagstaff’s premiere band. You know immediately you are destined to play with them. Three years later, they co-headline your band’s last show before you go off to college. You're still on the slide at that point.
I’m not on my death bed, but nonetheless, to you, I am folded up. And the truth is that, when posed with the Nietzsche question - would I live it all again, exactly as it happened - I have to say no. I wouldn’t. My life, as it happened, has not been worth living. At some point there was a divergence, all my greatest fears came true, and now I am full of regret. I’m a traitor.
But the one tiny emergent promise in my timeline has been the surprising but certain realization that our map of the universe is incomplete. Perhaps, just maybe, there be dragons. Science’s failure is my hope.
Meaning is weird. It has a retrocausal quality. Causation moves forward. This, now, causes that, then. It’s the power the past has over the future. But meaning is constructed in hindsight. Things can happen to you, and you won’t know what they meant within the overall narrative of your life until many years later. Power the future has over the past.
This is the best case for optimism. No matter what you’ve been through, you can ask yourself: what would have to happen such that it was all worth it? And if it’s within the constraints of the laws of physics, you can aim for that.
But what if it’s outside the laws of physics?
If there’s magic in the world, there’s magic in dreams. So I’m writing these letters to send to your dreams. I don’t know if you’ll receive them, I don’t know how you could.
Life plays out in chapters, and so will my correspondence to you. This is the first. I’m writing to you in desperation, from an ashen future. This is the last flare of a marooned sailor. It’s an attempt to rewrite the first chapter in the hope of forestalling the last. Maybe, if I believe hard enough, I could grow a tree with knots in just the right places to let light into your dark bedroom.
This is an attempt to change the past. That is my dream.
