The first letter arrived the morning after Jake’s second injection.

He was lying in the hospital bed, trying to distract himself from the waves of nausea and the robotic beep of the heart monitor. A nurse handed him the envelope without a word, her face carefully neutral.

The handwriting on the front made him freeze: To Jake, Age 16.

His own messy scrawl stared back at him.

Jake ripped it open, his hands trembling. The note inside was short.

"Hey. It's you. Or me. The trial worked. That's all I’ll say for now. Write back—there’s a lot we need to talk about."

Jake blinked at the letter, then reread it three more times. He told himself it had to be a weird prank—some elaborate thing the doctors were pulling to test his mental state. But something about the tone, the way it felt so much like him, unsettled him.

The next day, he wrote back, stuffing the letter into the envelope provided.

"Okay, fine. Let’s say this isn’t some weird experiment. What happens to me? Do I survive this thing? Is my body normal again? Am I… happy?"

The reply came the following morning.

"Yes, you survive. The gene therapy fixes the mutation. But 'normal' isn’t what you think it’ll be. As for happy? That depends on you. It’s not as simple as you think."

Jake spent hours staring at the letter, the words turning over in his mind. Over the next weeks, as the injections continued and his body waged war against itself, the letters became his lifeline.

"What do you mean, not 'normal'? Do I still play soccer?"
"You stop caring about soccer. You start caring about things you never imagined. You’re stronger than you think, but it’s not about muscles."

"What’s the hardest part?"
"Realizing the world doesn’t stop being broken just because you’re fixed."

"What’s the best part?"
"Realizing you can help fix it."

The exchanges blurred the line between hope and fear. Jake’s future self was careful, never revealing too much. But the words gave him just enough to keep going—to endure the nausea, the sleepless nights, the uncertainty of whether the treatment would succeed or kill him.

Finally, after his last injection, Jake wrote his longest letter yet.

"I don’t know who I’ll be, but I’m scared. Scared I’ll lose who I am now, even if that person is sick and weak. Scared I won’t live up to the version of me you seem to think I’ll become. But if you’re still there—if I make it—then I guess I’ll try to trust you. Don’t let me forget what this felt like. The fear, the hope, the fight. Write it down. Promise me you’ll remember."

The response came later that evening.

"You don’t have to worry about forgetting. It’s why I’m writing to you now. The fight is part of who we are, Jake. And no matter what, I promise we’ll remember."

The next day, Jake was discharged. He tucked the letters into his backpack, every word written by hands that were his but also not his yet. As he stepped outside and felt the sun on his face for the first time in months, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t just walking toward his future—he was walking with it.