There are things you carry before you know you are carrying them.

The vision was like that. Not a gift. Not a warning I could use. Just a deposit made into an account I did not know I had, in a currency I would not understand for fifty years. The bank did not send a letter. There was no explanation in the morning. Just the evidence in the bed and the house still sleeping and a thirteen year old boy standing in the dark at 427 College Road quietly doing the arithmetic on something that did not add up.

I have thought about what it means to be shown the future and not be able to read it.

It is not like knowing. Knowing would have been useful. Knowing would have let me prepare. What the vision gave me was something smaller and more complicated than knowing. It gave me familiarity. The specific quality of a thing that, when it finally arrived in waking life, carried the faint echo of having been there before. Not recognition. The ghost of recognition. The shadow of a memory without the memory itself.

When the car went sideways on the motorway — the real motorway, five decades after College Road — part of me did not panic.

I have wondered about that. I have wondered whether a man should panic when a car goes sideways at night on a motorway after two days without sleep. Whether the absence of panic was the vision doing its quiet work. Whether the thirteen year old boy had absorbed enough of it that night — had taken on enough of the exhaustion and the hands and the voices and the being asked if you are all right — that when it came for real the body had already rehearsed its response.

I do not know.

What I know is this. The younger me carried it without being asked. Fifty years without setting it down. And when the time came that I needed everything I had ever been shown, everything I had ever filed away in the places where you put the things you have no language for — it was there.

He had kept it safe.

That is what he does. That is what he has always done.

I was not ready at thirteen. I am not sure you can be ready. But he held it until I was.