Echoes of You

Message One

Sent: Mission Day 12

Estimated Receipt: Day 4,387

They didn’t tell me how long it would take for my voice to reach you.

They said years, the way people say weather.

Casual. Manageable. Something you plan around.

So this is me planning.

Right now, I’m strapped into a seat that wasn’t built for sleeping, staring at a window that hasn’t shown me Earth since yesterday—or maybe last week. The ship keeps a very polite silence, like it doesn’t want to interrupt what I’m about to lose.

By the time you hear this, I’ll be older.

Not in the way birthdays work—

in the way mirrors stop agreeing with you.

I keep thinking about the last thing you said to me. Not the dramatic goodbye. The small one. The one that mattered.

Don’t forget to drink water.

If I forget your face, remind me.

If I forget your voice, play this back and tell me it was mine once too.

They say nothing can outrun light.

They’re wrong.

I loved you faster than that.

If this message reaches you at all…

that means I’m still on my way.

And if it doesn’t—

then I hope the silence is kinder than the truth.

End message.

Message Two

Sent: Day 14

Received: Day 15

I got your message.

I know they told me not to say that yet — that it would confuse you, that the timelines would cross in ways that don’t feel fair. But I need you to know that right now, it arrived.

Your voice sounded the same.

A little thinner. Like you were trying not to scare me.

I played it twice before I let myself sit down.

You were wrong about one thing.

I won’t forget your face. I see it everywhere. In reflections. In strangers. In the quiet moments when nothing is asking for my attention.

I drank water today.

I thought you’d like that.

They keep telling me to stay busy. As if love is a room that needs cleaning. As if motion will keep it from settling.

I didn’t tell you this before you left, because I didn’t want to anchor you to something heavy.

But now you’re already moving too fast to stop.

I’m afraid.

Not of the distance.

Not of the years.

I’m afraid that by the time you hear this…

I’ll have learned how to live without you.

And I don’t know which of us that would hurt more.

End message.

Message Three

Sent: Mission Day 86

Estimated Receipt: Day 4,473

I waited too long to reply.

Or maybe you waited too long to hear it—time is a tricky thing now.

I keep imagining the words leaving my mouth, but then the ship shakes and I swallow them back. My tongue remembers your name, even if my mind doesn’t always.

Something happened today. Something I didn’t want to tell you… yet.

I saw someone else—someone I wasn’t supposed to see. Someone you wouldn’t understand.

I didn’t speak to them. I didn’t even acknowledge them.

But I felt… something. Something sharp and wrong and impossible.

I don’t know if that feeling is for you, for them, or just the way loneliness twists into something it shouldn’t.

By the time you hear this… maybe it won’t matter.

Or maybe it will, and there will be no way to fix it.

I’m trying not to let it break me. I’m trying to stay the person you fell in love with.

But I think… I’m starting to forget exactly who that is.

End message.