The Call From My Own Number
Rain hammered the windows like a drumline practicing at midnight, and I kept telling myself that the storm was just weather, nothing more. Then the phone lit up in my pocket, a pale blue glow that seemed to glow with something alive. The screen displayed “Incoming Call from Your Number.” Not from a contact, not from a friend, but from the digits I wore every day, the digits I swore I knew by heart. I almost didn’t answer. Almost. Curiosity pulled at my sleeve like a child tugging for the last slice of pie. When I pressed talk, the voice that answered sounded eerily familiar, as if the you who spoke in my ear had slept beside me for years and only now remembered how to wake up.
“Hello?” I whispered, though I knew it was not a question anyone could truly answer. The voice matched my own—cadence and breath, the careful rise and fall of syllables I’ve practiced a thousand times—yet it carried a tremor I hadn’t learned to imitate. “You’ve got to listen,” it said, and something in the phrase felt heavier than the rain. The clock on the wall blinked, as if winking at me, and the mirror across the room reflected not my face but a version of it that looked back with unspoken questions.
“If you hang up, the house will forget you for a while, and you’ll forget it, too.”
I asked the obvious questions—where are you, how is this possible, why am I the one on the line? The response arrived as a whisper at first, then steadied into the rhythm of a confession. The voice claimed to be me from a future that learned to predict the ache of the present and exploit it. It spoke of a fault in the timeline, a small crack through which a single decision could fracture everything. “I called you because you forgot to listen,” it said, as if reminding me of a necessary prayer I once offered and then forgot to recite.
- The timestamp on the call matches a moment I barely remember, as though time kept a second set of eyes on me.
- The voice breathes the same words I speak to myself in private, the ones I’m ashamed to admit aloud.
- A slavishly precise date appears in the message log, a date that should not exist for years to come.
- When I ask for proof, the line rings again, and this time the tone shifts—the voice sounds older, more certain, and undeniably mine.
The conversation spiraled into fragments—warnings tucked into ordinary sentences, threats disguised as apologies, promises that felt like bargains with fate. I hung up once, twice, each time the phone rebooted with a new pattern, a different breath in the same voice. Finally, I did something I hadn’t done in years: I walked to the window and pressed my palm to the glass, searching for a reflection that could tell me truth from memory. In that cold, merciless moment, the house seemed to lean closer, listening with every wooden floorboard creak.
When the call finally returned, it spoke not with questions but with a single imperative: “Answer me again, and bring the morning with you.” The line went dead, and the room exhaled as if waking from a dream it couldn’t quite remember. I stared at the phone, now silent, and tasted the taste of fear and inevitability on my tongue. The storm outside eased, but the quiet inside me grew louder, as if I had opened a door I wasn’t ready to close. I knew I could try to ignore the call, but I also knew I would listen again, because the unspoken truth remains: sometimes the only person you can trust on the line is the one who knows you best—the you you haven’t learned to trust yet.