CM87,

I spent the first few weeks after “The Big Jump” (the one where I time traveled from 1987 to 2014) trying to make sense of things. After I wrote you, I started to contemplate what unforeseen and potentially deleterious consequences could arise from trying to communicate with you. The more I pondered, the more afraid I became that your life would radically change. I feared the domino affect would thereafter change who I have become. So, it’s been almost a full year. My sense is that you still have not found out about me, seeing as I’ve received no emails from you. Everything for me has continued in a relatively tepid manner.

It is now the year 2015. I’ve mentioned this phenomenon of you-me to no one (I let it slip to Ms. McGinty one evening over several glasses of Kim Crawford but she forgot about it in the morning). I plan to keep it that way, because job prospects are already slim, I don’t think rumors of our situation will help that in any way.

As I said, everything is monitored now to some degree. Even this communication could be mined and hacked by the Firm, or some enterprising know-it-all. By now, it’s 1988 for you? You’re still like 7 years away from the movie Hackers, which came out the SAME YEAR as The Net. Computers are increasingly important in our lives. So much so that people are going on “tech-cleanses” where they leave technology behind deliberately, in order to find themselves.

But something startled me the other day as I was thinking about death. I think about death almost every day. You’ll get this reference: sort of like Christopher Walken in Annie Hall, when he confesses that sometimes when he his driving, he has an impulse to turn the wheel quickly head-on into oncoming traffic. Not like self-created death though, just a hyper-awareness of death’s presence. And as I thought about the fleeting nature of life, I thought, “what if I die before getting to connect with CM87?” There are too many unsolved mysteries to exit at this stage.

I have significantly less wisdom than I thought I’d have to impart to you. Presumably, you are doing the same things we did in 1987 (now 1988). Sometimes I wonder, are you sitting at a computer, just like me at this very moment? Is our universe entirely parallel? Are you typing right now? If I misspell a wrd do you do the same?

We have more advanced Spell Check now, and better word processing than Word Perfect.  But an important difference that you should be aware of is that many people in 2015 regularly communicate with “emoji.” The Japanese invented a way to combine a picture (e) with a character (moji) and now we don’t even need to use words to communicate.

For example, I like frogs.

Emoji are incredibly versatile, and very cutester. They can easily diffuse an otherwise hostile text. Just send a  as a peace offering.

Consider this today’s #CMFutureLesson (I’ll explain the # or “hashtag” in another lesson)

I am reaffirming my promise to you CM87: I will find you. I don’t know why this happened to us, and perhaps there is no meaning. But maybe we can create some meaning where there is none.

I keep holding out hope that you will figure out how to use email and find me.

Increasingly confused,

CM15