It started with a typo.
I was in the middle of one of those half-awake, early morning scrambles, packing for a business trip I didn’t want to take, halfway dressed, halfway alive, when I typed the message:
“I can’t do this anymore. I’m done pretending I’m okay.”
It was meant for my best friend, Maya. She’d been my rock since the breakup, the one person who knew how thin the thread had become.
But in my haze, I sent it to the wrong “M” in my contacts.
Marcus Larkin.
My old high school English teacher.
I didn’t even know I still had his number.
I stared at my phone in frozen horror, thumb hovering, praying the app would crash, or time would reverse.
Too late. Message delivered. Read.
I hadn’t spoken to him in nearly seven years. The last time we’d interacted, he’d handed me a worn paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye, underlined passages and all, and told me to “keep reading, even when life stops making sense.”
I hadn’t thought about him in ages.
Then my phone buzzed.
Marcus Larkin: Where are you?
Not What?
Not Wrong number.
Not Are you okay?
Just Where are you?
For reasons I still can’t fully explain, I answered.
“JFK. Gate 27. Flight to Seattle.”
No clue why I told him. Maybe I wanted someone to show up and stop me. Maybe I just wanted to know someone still cared.
Thirty minutes passed. No reply.
I boarded, heart heavy, eyes burning.
At 35,000 feet, I put my phone on airplane mode. Then I buried myself in emails and spreadsheets, pretending to be the competent person the conference expected.
Seattle was gray, wet, and impersonal. I spent the first night in a hotel room that smelled like overbleached linens and quiet disappointment.
That’s when I checked my phone again.
One message.
Marcus Larkin: Don’t disappear, Emma. You mattered once. You still do.
I stared at it for a long time. Not just the words—but the weight in them. Not pity. Not perfunctory concern.
Memory rushed in like a tide: me, sixteen, crying in the library over my parents’ divorce; him, sliding a notebook toward me with a single sentence written inside: Write it down, or it will bury you.
He’d been the first adult who saw me—not the grades, not the attitude, not the polished version I performed.
The real me. The scared, furious, breakable one.
The next day, I skipped the keynote speech and sat by the window of a café that overlooked the rain-slicked streets.
And I wrote back.
“I didn’t mean to send that to you. But maybe I did.”
Then:
“I haven’t been okay in a long time. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
I hit send and immediately regretted it. But not for long.
He responded almost instantly.
I figured something was wrong. Your words didn’t sound like the version of you the world knows. They sounded like the version I met in Room 203, writing poems on the margins of math homework.
That unlocked something.
I started writing more.
He replied with stories of other students who’d reached out. Some who’d lost their way. Some who hadn’t made it. Some who, like me, were still trying to figure out who they were when no one was watching.
We talked for hours. Not just that day. The next too.
Each message felt like a lifeline thrown across a storm.
On the flight home, I didn’t cry. Not out of joy, or resolution, or even sadness. Just… stillness. The first stillness I’d felt in months.
When I landed, there was another message waiting.
If you’re ready to talk in person, I’ll be at the place where you won your first poetry contest. Tuesday. 6 PM.
My heart did something strange.
That contest. It was a lifetime ago. A dusty church basement turned performance venue. I’d read a shaky poem about wanting to run away and live in a forest. He’d been the only person clapping at the end.
I didn’t tell anyone where I was going Tuesday. I just drove.
The old venue was barely standing. Peeling paint. A cracked sign. But the front door creaked open like it remembered me.
And there he was. Gray around the edges, thinner than I remembered, but unmistakably Mr. Larkin.
We sat on the stage steps, a thermos of tea between us.
He didn’t ask what happened. He didn’t push.
He just said, “Still writing?”
I shook my head. “I stopped when things got hard.”
He smiled sadly. “That’s when you’re supposed to start.”
We sat in silence for a while.
Then I asked the question I didn’t know I’d come to ask.
“Why did you reply?”
He looked at me, eyes soft.
“Because once, years ago, I almost sent a message like that. And no one answered.”
That night, I picked up a pen for the first time in months.
Not for work. Not for productivity. Just… for me.
The message I sent by accident? Maybe it wasn’t an accident at all.
Maybe some messages are meant to find the right person, even if you send them to the wrong one.
Epilogue
Six months later, I self-published a small collection of essays and poems. I dedicated it to the person who reminded me that broken doesn’t mean finished.
The title?
“Accidental Messages.”
And on the last page:
Sometimes the wrong number is the right person.
Sometimes the mistake is the miracle.
End
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