It began, as most urban legends do, with someone claiming it actually happened.

A woman named Caren worked in an old post office near the edge of town. She was used to sorting through yellowed envelopes and forgotten packages—ghosts of correspondence that never found their homes. One evening, she noticed something strange: a small, cream-colored envelope with her own handwriting on it. The address was hers. The sender’s name was also hers.  

The date on the postmark read: **October 13, 2035.**

Inside was a folded letter written in familiar, looping strokes she couldn’t deny were her own.  

> “If you’re reading this, it means the first part has worked.  

>  Don’t tell anyone you received this. Not your friends, not the police.  

>  You’ll soon understand why.  

>  Wait exactly ten days, and you’ll find the reason you’ve been chosen.”

No one else saw the letter. No one could explain how it bypassed every postal system in the country.  

But rumors spread—people whispered about **letters that came from the future**, always written in the recipient’s own hand, always sealed with wax so fresh it still smelled of heat.  

Each contained a variation of the same warning: *Never speak of it, or the chance will vanish.*

Caren kept the letter, half afraid, half exhilarated. She counted the days. On the tenth night, she dreamed of her older self—gray hair, trembling hands—sitting at the same kitchen table, writing the same letter.  

When she woke up, her curtains were fluttering though the windows were closed. On the table lay another envelope, newer, crisper, addressed to someone she didn’t know: **"Mr. Oliver Trent."**

That morning, she disappeared.

Oliver, an accountant from two districts over, found the letter slipped under his apartment door. The handwriting was unmistakable—his own cursive, his favorite brand of ink.  

Inside:  

> “Ten years have passed since I wrote this.  

>  Don’t panic. Don’t speak.  

>  I promise it’s all worth it. You’re close now.”

Oliver laughed at first, certain it was a prank. But as he reread it, the confidence of the strokes unnerved him. His future self sounded so calm, so certain. He decided to keep it secret, to “play along.”  

On the tenth day, he won a small lottery—nothing huge, but enough to shake him.  

He told no one, just as instructed.  

Two days later, his body was found at the base of his apartment building. No witnesses, no signs of a struggle. Only an open window, and a pen gripped so tightly in his fist the ink had stained his palm black.

The legend spread like mold.  

Every few years, a few people claimed to have received such letters—each written in their own unmistakable hand, each with the same warning of silence, each followed by an unexplainable windfall... and a death.  

Investigators noticed a pattern: the letters always appeared exactly ten years after the recipient’s death, addressed to a new stranger. The handwriting always matched.  

One detective, driven by obsession, decided to write his own. He forged the future, copying his penmanship, and addressed it to himself ten years ahead. He sealed it and left it in his desk drawer.

He didn’t die.  

But ten years later, his son found the envelope sitting neatly on the kitchen counter—with a fresh date stamp from a post office that had burned down seven years earlier.

The legend claims that once the letter “circulates” through enough hands, it remembers its own origin—and begins writing itself.  

Some say the pen that first wrote it was dipped in human blood.  

Others insist it’s the future itself, trying to pull us closer, one signature at a time.

No one knows what’s true.  

But if one day you find an envelope in your own handwriting, marked with a date ten years ahead—  

do not open it.  

Do not read it.  

And whatever you do—  

**don’t tell anyone you got it.**