I Met My Future Self in a Dream—And I Listened

It started like any other dream—vague, ungrounded, fleeting.

I was standing in my childhood bedroom, the walls still that same pale blue, the posters from my teenage years impossibly back on the walls. It was home but.not quite. Like something recalled that had been changed.

Then I saw her.

She stood at the window, gazing out as though expecting something. Her hair was a little shorter than mine. A few more gray streaks. She moved with the peace of someone who had nothing to prove anymore.

When she turned, I did not scream. I did not run. I just.knew.

She was me.

Older. Wiser. Weary, but not broken.

"Sit," she whispered, and I did, collapsing onto the edge of the bed as I did after school, exhausted and melodramatic.

"I haven't much time," she said. "You're going to make a choice soon. One you'll regret if you don't listen carefully."

"What kind of choice?" I demanded, my voice miraculously steady.

She smiled, as if she remembered how stubborn I used to be. "You're thinking of settling. A job. A boyfriend. A life that's good on paper but terrible in your bones."

I didn't respond, but I didn't need to. She already knew.

"You're scared of failing," she continued. "So you're choosing safe. And safe will keep you warm at night… until it won't."

My stomach twisted. "How do you know?"

"Because I lived it," she stated. "I stayed. I smiled. I made it work. And then one day I woke up and didn't know the life I'd created."

She extended a hand, shoving something into my palm. A small crumpled picture—of me, laughing on stage at open mic night, something I hadn't done since college.

"You loved that girl you were," she whispered. "She was alive. Loud. Free."

I stared at the picture, my throat tightening.

"You still have time," she told me. "It's not too late to choose the fire, though it may burn a little."

I looked up to ask her, anything—but the room had changed. The walls melted, the light faded, and I woke with tears in my eyes and the memory of her words ringing in my head.

I tried to brush it off that morning. Told myself I'd had a dream. But something had shifted.

When I got the call later that week with the offer of the promotion I'd been working towards—good salary, long hours, and a slow death of the soul—I hesitated.

Then I said no.

I did the opposite. I submitted an application for a part-time job at a tiny writing studio in the city. I started going to open mics again. I called the friend I hadn't talked to in months and told him I missed his laughter.

It wasn't easy. It wasn't tidy.

But it was right.

Some evenings, when the city winds down and my anxieties get the better of me, I think about her—my future self, still standing in front of that window. I wonder if she's proud of me now. If I've changed her destiny by changing mine.

All I know is this:

That dream?

It wasn't a warning.

It was a second chance.

And this time, I listened.

-Amzad Rahid