In Honor of Lauren Kay Echoes of the Past The Letters at the Edge of Everything

The Letters

At the Edge of Everything

by Bernard Thomas Henry Jr.

Dear Future Me,

If you’re reading this, it means we didn’t give up.

I’m writing from the wobbly little desk by the window, the one that’s half desk, half rescued-from-the-sidewalk miracle. There’s a coffee ring burned into the corner, which I keep pretending is symbolic instead of proof I never use a coaster.

The manuscript pages are a mess.

The novel is a mess.

I am a mess.

But I’m writing anyway.

If you’ve moved on to better spaces with real chairs and a window that seals properly, promise you’ll still remember this place. The radiator that hisses like it’s offering editorial feedback. The neighbors’ voices threading through the walls. The way the city feels impossibly loud and impossibly kind on the same night.

Promise me you’ll remember what it felt like before everything changed.

Love,

You, Before

Lauren folded the letter along its faded crease and let her fingers rest on the paper a moment longer. The edges had softened with age, thinned as if time had quietly worn it down whenever she wasn’t looking.

The apartment smelled the same, dust, faint coffee, and something warmer beneath it, like the ghost of a thousand quiet mornings.

She had sworn she would never come back.

The vow had been a private thing, tossed into the dark on one of those nights when everything hurt in a way that felt both small and enormous. Back then, the apartment hadn’t been a shrine to beginnings. It had been a reminder of every almost and not-yet. She’d left with two suitcases, a half-finished novel, and a promise to herself that she would not return until the story of her life had shifted.

Now, years later, the shift was written into her days.

A debut novel with HarperCollins.

Online courses for writers.

A community that called itself Lauren Kay Writes.

Messages from strangers who no longer felt like strangers at all.

Some days, she could barely remember the girl at the wobbly desk. Other days, that girl felt closer than her own reflection.

“Do you remember…?” she whispered to the empty room, laughing softly at herself.

The landlord had texted that morning:

We’re renovating the unit. If you want to see it before it’s different, this is your last chance.

It was the gentlest ultimatum she had ever received.

So she came.

The key still turned with the same reluctant click. The door opened onto a room that felt both smaller and infinite. Most of her life since then had happened elsewhere, but somehow it all echoed here.

She found the box within minutes.

It was tucked into the back of the closet, behind dusty hangers and a coat she vaguely remembered meaning to donate. A cardboard shoebox wrapped in a faded red ribbon.

Her heart stuttered as she slid the ribbon free.

Inside were the letters.

Dear Future Me,

Today an agent rejected me with what I think might be the kindest no in the history of no’s. She said the characters were “shining,” but the stakes “weren’t quite clear yet.”

I cried anyway.

I keep thinking, What if this never happens?

What if the future I imagine, you, is just a story I tell myself because the real story is too scary?

So I’m doing something that may be ridiculous. I’m writing you letters.

It feels less lonely, imagining that you exist. Imagining a day when the book on this desk has a cover, when someone who isn’t another struggling writer reads it on a subway or in a Target parking lot.

If that happens, please don’t forget this part.

Don’t forget how brave we were to keep going with nothing but words in our hands.

Love,

You,

with one foot in doubt and one foot in hope

Lauren pressed the page to her chest.

There had been a time when traditional publishing felt like a locked door with no handle. She had collected rejections like confetti, some gentle, some sharp, some slicing so quietly she didn’t realize she was bleeding until later.

Back then, she had started Lauren Kay Writes as a way to share what she was learning even before she had anything official to prove. It had felt audacious, offering guidance while still fumbling in the dark.

But people wrote back.

They said her honesty mattered more than her certainty.

She took another letter from the box.

Dear Future Me,

Today I almost quit.

Not the dramatic, throw-my-hands-up version. I mean I sat on the floor between the couch and the coffee table and seriously considered dragging a folder called The End of This Dream into my mental trash bin.

Then something strange happened.

I opened the draft anyway. Just ten minutes, I told myself.

A character surprised me.

Ten minutes turned into an hour.

I realized I’m not just chasing a dream. I’m in a relationship with my own curiosity.

If you ever have readers, students, or a community, tell them this:

It’s okay to almost quit.

Almost quitting still counts as staying.

Love,

You, still here

Lauren smiled. That line, almost quitting still counts as staying, had slipped into a lesson once. People quoted it back to her for months.

She crossed to the window. The sill still bore the shallow grooves where she had balanced her laptop when she needed a different view of the world.

Brooklyn’s winter light filtered through the glass.

Her phone buzzed.

New comment, Hannah (Query Bootcamp):

I almost quit this week. Then I remembered what you said about how the past version of us deserves to see what happens if we keep going. I printed that line and taped it to my wall.

Lauren read it twice.

There it was again, the echo.

The girl writing letters to a future self.

The woman answering writers who were, in some quiet way, her former selves.

She typed back quickly.

I’m so glad you stayed. Your future self is already proud of you.

The room felt a fraction quieter, as if the past had leaned in to listen.

Another letter waited.

Dear Future Me,

Do I know you?

I picture you sometimes, talking about plot arcs on a podcast, signing books with our name on the cover, answering a reader who says, “Your book made me feel less alone.”

But I’m afraid you’ll forget.

Forget how every no used to feel like proof that you’d misheard your calling. Forget the nights you lay awake wondering if you should be doing something safer, more respectable.

Promise me something?

If you ever stand in front of writers, tell the whole truth.

Tell them how scared you were.

Tell them how magical it felt the first time a stranger called you their favorite author.

Both things can live in the same body.

Be the person you wished you had when you were here.

Love,

You, mid-chapter, mid-fear, mid-hope.

Lauren read the letter aloud.

“You were right,” she murmured. “You did end up in front of rooms full of writers. And you told them the truth.”

The radiator clicked like punctuation.

She reached for the letter with the most wrinkled edges. She recognized the date instantly.

It was from the week her agent called.

Dear Future Me,

I think you just arrived.

Today my agent said the words I’ve been imagining you hearing, We have an offer.

A six-figure, two-book deal. With HarperCollins.

I wrote that sentence twice because I don’t believe it belongs to us.

I wish I could tell you I stayed calm. You know that isn’t true.

I refreshed my inbox like it was my job.

I nearly set this box of letters on fire more than once.

But I kept coming back here.

To the desk.

To the words.

To you.

Please don’t let this be the end of the story.

Use whatever this opens, access, insight, platform, to make things easier for the writers behind you. Build a bridge out of every question you had to answer alone.

If success is only yours, it’s too small.

Love,

You,

in stunned, grateful disbelief

Tears blurred the ink.

“If success is only yours, it’s too small,” Lauren repeated.

She sank onto the edge of the bare bed frame. The springs complained but held.

That was what Lauren Kay Writes had become, a bridge. Every workshop. Every marked-up query. Every late-night message answered with honesty instead of polish.

She hadn’t realized she was building it while she crossed.

Another letter waited.

Dear Future Me,

You did something terrifying today.

You asked people to trust you, not just with their time, but with their dreams.

You said, I can help you with this, and meant it.

People signed up. Writers from Ohio. From the UK. From Australia, logging in at three in the morning. They wrote things like, I feel less alone already.

I’m proud of you. But I’m worried, too.

You know how easily we fall into, Who am I to do this?

So remember the girl at this desk, writing letters into the dark because she had no one to ask.

You’re her answer.

You don’t have to know everything.

You just have to keep telling the truth.

Love,

You,

on the cusp of becoming a mentor

Lauren laughed softly.

“Okay,” she said to the room. “I hear you.”

She stacked the letters on the desk and finally looked at the space as a whole.

The scuffs on the floor where she paced during calls with her agent. The corner where she read the offer email again and again. The window where she watched seasons change while a manuscript slowly learned how to become a book.

Past and present layered over each other like translucent pages.

Her phone buzzed again.

New email, Reedsy Prompts, Echoes of the Past with Lauren Kay

She smiled. She had agreed to curate this week’s theme, stories about memory, about the places we swear we’ll never return to, about what we carry and what we finally set down.

In the middle of the email was her own quote:

Strong fiction doesn’t just recount what happened. It examines how past experiences shape us, how certain moments linger long after they’ve passed, and how we make meaning from what we’ve lived through.

Lauren glanced at the letters.

“I see what you did there, universe.”

She imagined writers reading the announcement at bus stops and kitchen tables and narrow desks cluttered with notebooks and fear.

Can I do this? Does my story matter?

She wanted to answer them all.

Instead, she reached into the box and discovered one final sheet, a blank page tucked beneath the others.

She sat.

The wobble was still there.

Somehow, it steadied her.

She began to write.

Dear Past Me,

You were right.

I thought I would write this to you from somewhere glamorous, a studio, a book tour stop, a sunlit office with shelves that reached the ceiling.

Instead, I’m here.

At the desk.

With the coffee ring.

With the radiator still arguing in the corner.

It feels like the only place this letter belongs.

You asked if I would remember you.

Yes.

I remember the curtains that never quite closed. I remember the printed pages that felt heavier and lighter than they should. I remember the nights you lay awake wondering if you were foolish for wanting this so much.

I also remember your bravery.

You called it stubbornness. I call it devotion.

You asked me to tell the truth.

Here it is.

Being on this side of the dream is both exactly what you hoped and completely different. The book deal didn’t erase your self-doubt. Success brought new fears, new expectations, new comparisons.

But it also brought something you couldn’t have imagined.

A community.

Writers who say your name like a friend. People who feel less alone because you shared your messy process instead of pretending it was tidy.

You wanted to end gatekeeping. It became your compass.

You did stand in front of rooms full of writers. You did say the things you once whispered only to me, Your voice matters. The fact that this is hard does not mean you’re doing it wrong.

You asked me to build a bridge.

It’s here.

It looks like workshops and emails and late-night messages from people who finally pressed send because you walked them through how.

You worried I would forget what it felt like to be you.

I haven’t.

The more writers I support, the more clearly I see you in their hesitation, in the careful hope behind their questions. It’s like looking into a mirror that reflects not only back, but backward.

You asked me not to let the story end with a deal.

It didn’t.

That was only the midpoint twist.

The heart of the story lives in messages that begin with, I thought I was alone, but…

You told me that if success was only mine, it would be too small.

I listened.

There is one thing you never asked, and it matters most.

You were always enough.

Not the version with the contract.

Not the name in the bio.

You, here.

Waiting.

Writing.

Believing before there was proof.

The future didn’t make you real.

You were real then.

I came back today because I thought I needed closure. I thought I could finally label this place before and move on.

Instead, I found you.

And in finding you, I remembered why I do this.

Tomorrow, writers will open an email and see my name. They may think I’m on the other side of something they haven’t reached yet.

But tonight, I’m here with you.

We are the same distance from the page.

Thank you for writing to me when I was still only a possibility.

Thank you for trusting that I existed.

Love,

You, After

Lauren read the letter twice.

The words were not perfect.

They were true.

She folded the page and slid it into the box. The red ribbon, frayed at the edges, waited patiently. She tied it carefully around the stack.

This time, it didn’t feel like sealing something away.

It felt like honoring it.

At the door, she paused.

A story lingered at the edge of her mind, a writer returning to the place she swore she’d never revisit, finding letters from the person she used to be, discovering she had become what she needed.

Maybe other people would see themselves in it.

Maybe the girl at the wobbly desk was never only her.

Lauren stepped into the hallway, the box of letters tucked under her arm, and walked toward the future she had once imagined only in ink.