I hope this finds you well, if it finds you at all.

I walked by our old house this morning. The whole yard was flooded, caution tape everywhere. Empty driveway. Whoever lives there now must have abandoned ship while they waited for the plumbers to sort it all out. But it gave me an idea.

I always wondered what you must have felt, waiting on the other side for your Ryan to come through, imperfect though you knew he’d be: waiting while the whole place started to shiver and crumble and expand around you. Maybe you thought we both died down there. Maybe you did too but I don’t think so. I bet you were smart enough to run.

I hope you found another way back up to the surface, like I did. Took some doing. There were no more power bars by the time I made it out and hadn’t been for a while. But I did make it out, in the end.

Maybe it would be better to let you keep thinking I’m dead. Maybe I shouldn’t be writing this. But I think you’d rather know. There’s a difference between dead and gone, despite the expression. I think you’d prefer knowing that one Ryan, at least, survived. I never really did understand how you think, but I’m reasonably sure about that.

Water gushing up from the basement windows. A mess. But I found a little whirlpool in the swamp of the front yard, a big exposed pipe sucking liquid back in. Back down. That’s where I’ll drop this, I suppose. Maybe that pipe just leads to the city sewer system, but maybe, if I’m lucky, it goes a lot deeper.

I’ll triple-bag the shit out of this first, though, because, and I hate to say this, the letter you gave me didn’t survive my swim through.

The seal on that baggie must not have been tight. When I finally pulled it out, back on the surface, the letter was soaked through and mostly illegible. Something seemed to have expanded it, too. All that was left was a nightmare of bloated wood pulp and smeared squiggles. Too much of both. But after a lot of tweezer work, I pieced together a little. Not the whole story, but enough to maybe get the gist.

We were wrong, weren’t we? About you guys being trapped on the wrong side, like us. We could never figure out why you didn’t use your keys to come through, since you should have had them both, one bent on the counter and the other stuck in the door. We didn’t think how easy they’d be to miss. How the two of you, coming back from an expedition to your own side, might have gone straight through without seeing them at all.

How the four of us all ended up trapped together. Only you had no need for the keys or to get back through, because you were home where you belonged, on your own side. The problem was that two doppelgangers had followed you through.

Us.

You figured it out a lot quicker than we did, I think. How that loss of synchronicity had pulled our twin houses partially apart, like a gardener starting to separate two potted flowers. Even if we’d had the key, the connection through the fridge was gone. Too shallow, too close to the surface. What would we have found in there, if we’d forced it open? Maybe an endless tunnel of fridge insides: vinyl walls paved in vegetable drawers, stretching to infinity, going nowhere. How’s that for a road to hell?

So you had to figure out a different way to get rid of us. We were sleeping in your beds. Eating your food. Stealing your lives while you lurked below, afraid to come near us and push things even further out of sync, sneaking up to steal food in the middle of the night, thieves in your own house. And the only way to send us back was to find another connection point, a deeper one, down where roots still twined together. And prod us into finding it, too. You had a lot more time to explore than we did. Downstairs became your home.

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You couldn’t explain things to us, not directly. Because if we’d also realized how much things had diverged, it would have tugged our universes even further apart. So you tried to find the subtlest ways to send a message. Saying things without changing hardly anything. Tweaking the note, the video. Pulling us back from the dead-end of the crawlways. Nudging us away from the red herrings closer to the surface, to deeper explorations. Toward the new way through you’d discovered. A flooded tunnel, buried deep. A way to get us back home.

I think about that a lot. We were your monsters. But you helped us anyway. Maybe you didn’t see any other choice, but still. That was pretty great of you.

A lot of your note was illegible, and like I said, there seemed to be way too many pages, and a lot of duplicates. But toward the end I could piece together a few phrases, and I think I figured out some of how your story ended.

Once you’d found the flooded connection, you could pass through to our home universe, and help clear the way back for us. Leave guide ropes. Make it easy. One of you stayed to keep an eye on us, to make sure we “discovered” the flooded tunnel. Once we did, the plan was probably that you’d swim back through in advance, so that, when the time came, all four of us could pass each other in the flooded tunnel, and the two of us could keep holding onto the thread of belief that synchronicity wasn’t broken. At least until we were all in the right place again and what we believed no longer mattered.

But then that other Niko crept up from the depths of possibility down there, and fucked everything up. You didn’t see that coming, I don’t think. How could you have?

Bitterness, multiplied. Multiplicious.

Did you find your own body, murdered, mutilated, in one of those bland hallways?

I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what that must have been like.

I don’t know quite how to tell you this next part.

Your Ryan never came back because he saved me. He chose to save me. I don’t know why. I didn’t deserve saving. But he did it anyway.

You saved me too, of course. On the bedroom tube above that awful void, and other times besides. And I deserved even less to be saved by you, maybe. Maybe you should have let me die. But you didn’t. Neither of you did. And I can never pay you back for that.

But I am enclosing ten bucks, though, for the drink you bought me that night at the Russian dance club. I assume your Ryan was as much of a mooch as me. I did say I’d get you back, didn’t I?

Anyway. I should wrap this up. If I spend all day writing mysterious letters to another man, my boyfriend might get jealous. Adam. His name’s Adam.

Maybe it’s ridiculous to think something as tiny as a triple-bagged USB key wrapped in a ten-spot could possibly find its way to you. If our two universes connect at all any more, it’s far, far down, deep in knotted skeins, hopelessly tangled. I imagine this baggie winding its way through miles of piping, tumbling down moss-covered tunnels, floating through submerged, warped bedrooms. Somehow making its way back up to another surface, another flood. Seems silly. But I see it in my head, vivid. I try to believe it, to possible it, even though the odds seem astronomical.

On the other hand, with so many possibilities down there, maybe it’s inevitable.

Irrational, but true.

I haven’t dreamt about you in years, but I did last night. Not in particulars. Your name just sort of floated through me, troubling in some way but not defined. A word repeated until it loses its meaning, becomes obsessed with itself. A reflection’s reflection. It’s why I came by the old house, but all that was here was a flooded yard. All it reflected was me.

I never knew what we were to each other back then. Something less than all those things we never were, but more than a friendship. An else-ship, maybe. An other-ship. Traces of mingled shrapnel under shared skin. Broken pieces of each other we tried to make our own.

I guess we’re just left with what we had. Have. Definitely have, yeah? Because we’re gone to each other, but not dead. We survived.

So hey. I hope you’re doing all right in your weird world where people say “fourth” instead of “fourd.” I hope you found better people to hang out with and a new set of hobbies and someone to appreciate your fashion sense. I hope even if not everyone wants to accept the bills in your wallet, you figured out a way to spend them anyway. If you know what I mean.

I miss you sometimes, but that’s okay.

We made it. And I think... I think we’ll be alright.

Nah. Scratch that.

I trust we will.