Yesterday's Future

The last time I stood on the rooftop of our old apartment building, the city looked different.

Back then, we were seventeen. The skyline shimmered with possibility, every blinking light a promise waiting to be kept. We called it “the edge of tomorrow”—that crumbling rooftop with graffiti on the walls, where dreams felt like they might leap straight into the sky.

“I’m going to build something that matters,” you told me once, your breath visible in the winter air. “Not just make money or survive. I want to build something people remember.”

I nodded. “And I’ll write. About us. About this.”

You laughed. “Who’s going to read a book about two kids staring at airplanes?”

I smiled back. “You. When we’re old.”

That was twelve years ago.

Now I stood there alone, the wind colder than I remembered, the rooftop smaller. The building next to ours had grown taller—steel and glass climbing higher than any dream we ever sketched on notebook margins. Progress. Time’s monument.

I took the old Polaroid out of my pocket. Us, blurry and half-smiling. You had written in the white space below: "This is what yesterday’s future looks like."

Back then, it felt poetic. Now it felt like a question I didn’t know how to answer.


---

We had it all planned.

You’d go to college for engineering. I’d major in literature. We’d move to the city, share an apartment, chase our dreams until they caught us or killed us.

But the thing no one tells you about futures is how fragile they are.

Your scholarship fell through. Mine didn’t. You stayed behind to help your mother after her accident. I left. I told myself it was temporary.

We called. We wrote. For a while.

Then time got in the way.

I published my first book at twenty-six. It was about us, thinly veiled behind fiction. It sold decently. You messaged me congratulations. I said thank you. You said you liked chapter seven. I never asked which part.

You stopped replying after that.

I stopped writing about you.


---

Until last week, when your sister called.

She found my number buried in an old phone, still saved under "Skyline." She said the accident was sudden. A drunk driver. A rainy road. You didn’t make it.

I hadn’t seen you in ten years. I didn’t even know you still lived here. I asked if I could come to the funeral. She said yes.

And now I was back on the roof, holding the photograph you never threw away.

I imagined you standing beside me again, eyes squinting against the sun, hair tousled by wind. Would you recognize me now? Would I recognize you?

In the distance, I saw a plane cut through the clouds—just like we used to watch. You once said they looked like punctuation marks in the sky. I never understood what you meant. Maybe I do now.

Maybe you were telling me that life is a sentence we write one word at a time, and sometimes we don’t realize we’ve reached the end of a chapter until it’s already behind us.


---

As I turned to leave, I heard laughter.

Two teenagers had climbed onto the rooftop. A boy and girl, backpacks slung low, their conversation light and fast, filled with the same dreams we once whispered into the wind.

They didn't notice me. Why would they? I was yesterday now.

But as I passed them, the girl asked, “Do you ever wonder what the future looks like?”

The boy shrugged. “Probably like this. Just... older.”

I smiled. Maybe they were right. Maybe yesterday’s future isn't some grand revelation or perfect destination. Maybe it's just this—returning to where we once began, older, quieter, but still reaching for the sky.

Before I stepped through the rooftop door, I left the Polaroid wedged in the metal railing, fluttering slightly in the wind.

A memory. A reminder. A punctuation mark in someone else’s story.