Luis’s old man had a strange tolerance for kids like me. Maybe he knew we had nowhere else to go. Maybe he’d just given up. Either way, he let me crash on the floor of Luis’s room, a place that smelled of old socks, cheap weed, and the kind of quiet desperation that seeps into the walls when you’re young and can’t see a future.
Luis, he was on probation, his wings clipped by the state. Had to be home by nine every night. So his house became a holding cell for the rest of us lost boys, a halfway point between bad decisions and worse ones.
That night, I was lying on the carpet, headphones on, a stolen Sony Walkman pressing into my skull. I had Depeche Mode’s “Blasphemous Rumors” on repeat, letting it loop until the song was just a part of the noise in my head. I was high on acid, deep into that weird stage where the visuals start to fade but the thoughts get deeper, stickier.
At first, it was the usual circus—the walls breathing, phantom ants crawling up my legs. But then, it all slowed down. I wasn’t just a spectator in my own mental chaos anymore. I was watching a movie. And it was structured, vivid, clear as the goddamn screen you’re reading this on.
I saw myself. Older. Married for twenty years to some blonde woman I’d never met. I saw three kids. Two daughters and a son. Their names just appeared in my head like they’d always been there. The details were sharp, terrifyingly clear. I saw a life. A career. A fucking mechanical engineer. Me.
The acid had to be laced with some kind of cruel joke. That was the last thing I ever wanted to be—a guy in khaki pants, talking about torque ratios, wearing a name badge. But there I was in the vision, older, successful, comfortable. Owning a business. Retiring at thirty-five.
Retiring at thirty-five? Jesus. Lying on that filthy floor at sixteen, I couldn’t imagine making it to twenty-one.
But the vision kept playing. The wife, the kids, the house with a goddamn lawn. Dinners at a table. Stability. Order. Something that felt so conservative, so planned, so fucking perfect it might as well have been Mormon. Then it all shifted, blurred. Divorce. Movement. The slow unraveling of that life into travel and reinvention. The clarity faded, but the core of it stayed, branded onto my brain.
These weren’t my thoughts. They weren’t my desires. They were just… there. A broadcast from some other planet being beamed directly into my skull. And that’s what scared the hell out of me.
Because years later, after I’d mostly forgotten about it, I confessed that vision to the only real girlfriend I ever had. And as I said it, the cold realization washed over me.
It all happened. All of it.
I married a blonde. We stayed together for twenty years. We had three kids, with names so close to the ones in the vision it makes my skin crawl. I became a mechanical engineer. I retired at thirty-five. I lived the exact goddamn life I had seen while tripping balls on a stranger’s floor in a house where I didn’t belong.
It wasn’t effort. It wasn’t intention. It was like gravity. The kind of thing you don’t even notice until you’re at the bottom of the hill, looking back up and wondering how the fuck you got there. There was no avoiding it, no diverging from the path. The universe had whispered its blueprint to me that night, and I had been too stupid or too high to do anything but follow it.
I’ve spent years since the divorce thinking about that night, trying to figure out if I willed it into existence, or if it was all set in stone long before I took that tab of acid. Was the future something we build, or something we just stumble into, like an old friend waiting for you at a bar you don’t remember agreeing to meet at?
Now, all these years later, I’m still watching. Still waiting for the next vision. Still listening for that little hum beneath the noise, that current nudging me toward something else. Something beyond the blueprint I followed without ever having drafted it myself.
Maybe that’s the real joke. We spend our lives thinking we have control, but we’re just filling in the blanks of a story that’s already been written. I don’t know if I believe in fate. I don’t know if I believe in God.
But I do know that when I was sixteen, high out of my mind on a dirty floor, I saw a life I didn’t understand.
And then I lived it.
And that still scares the hell out of me.
Author’s Notes:
That story… it’s different from the others. The other stories are about the predictable horrors: shitty parents, bad booze, women who leave, men who are weak. You can understand them, even if you hate them. They’re just the usual human misery.
This one? This one is about the universe being a crooked dealer.
The easy thing is to write it off. To say, “The kid was high on acid, he had a fucked-up hallucination.” But that’s too simple, isn’t it? Because it all came true. That’s the part that sticks in your craw and twists. It’s not a drug story. It’s a ghost story. Only the ghost was your own goddamn future, showing up early to the party.
And think about what that does to a man. Your whole life, you think you’re the one kicking down doors, making deals, clawing your way up from the gutter. You build this whole identity around being a self-made bastard who beat the odds. Then you look back at this one night on a dirty floor and realize you might not have been the architect at all. You might have just been the construction worker, the dumb grunt building a house from a blueprint you never even saw.
The fear at the end of that story, that’s the realest thing. It’s not the fear of failure or loneliness. It’s the fear that you have no goddamn control. That your greatest victories and your most spectacular fuck-ups were all just scenes in a play that was written before you were even born. That’s a terror that makes a fistfight or a broken heart look like a walk in the park.
So yeah, my thoughts are this: that story is the one that really haunts you, isn’t it? Because if that whole first life was just a script you were following, what about this one? This plan for Argentina, this “new chapter.” Are you finally writing your own lines?
Or are you just waiting for the universe to hand you the next page?
