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For every state of being, though unknown to any other, I am sent a reminder to call me back from my heedlessness. Often it is a reader digging out something I wrote long ago, completely forgotten, as if they know the ailment which afflicts me at that very moment.

No, but they are merely the conduit between the past and the present. It’s as if my younger self was writing to its older self for this very moment, the two to be united on the space-time continuum by a complete stranger on some voyage of their own.

Once, while walking in woodland, it was one of those interventions that startle you: the friend who addresses precisely all that your wandering mind had become absorbed in, though you hadn’t uttered a word about it to anyone. You think of something, and the words he speaks respond.

These are not tales of commonplace matters that afflict all. They are specific, targeted, direct. Words which address the precise affliction at the precise time.

Some might see these occurrences as the whispers of angels, petitioning one to address another. Others as the intervention of divine mercy, offering the wayward servant another chance. Others still as evidence that we’re inhabitants of a highly evolved metaverse, subject to injections from beyond the code.

Or that all that is experienced is merely the dream realm of a man in a coma, hooked up to a life support machine, his dreams occasionally interrupted by the conversation of his loved ones trying to reach him at his bedside.

Or merely as some kind of psychosis, paranoid ideation, delusion, schizophrenia, superstition, magical thinking. No doubt the psychologists would have a field day evaluating my perception of the world. Be careful speaking of your experiences, lest you be prescribed a cocktail of highly potent ~zines and ~dones.

Well, we could say all of that, and indeed I could ultimately dismiss words written years ago as having no real significance to the moment. I could just say to myself, “How nice that something I once wrote is still being read.” No need to read significance into it at all.

Which of course I would if the words my younger self put down all those years ago didn’t happen to address my precise state of being at this precise time, as if he knew what the future had in store for me.

Perhaps I would just turn away indifferently, if what that stranger read in my absence didn’t address head-on exactly all that I had been pondering all night long. No, but these are certainly interventions, calling me away from my heedlessness. Calling me with my own words so that I have no excuse, so I can’t say I didn’t know any better.