There is a café in a book I read where you can sit in a chair and go back to a time you'd give almost anything to reach. The rules are tight. You are a ghost to everyone there. You can only meet someone who has already visited. You have to finish the whole cup before it goes cold, because if you don't, the seat keeps you: you become the ghost in the chair. And you cannot get up mid-visit; leave the seat and you're yanked straight back to the present.
I know what I would do. I would sit once. One sentence I never said, said properly, to someone who cannot answer. If a second trip were allowed, I would take it, and that is exactly why I do not trust the chair.
The trap is not the time travel. The trap is the repeat. Sit once and you are saying the thing you needed to say. Sit five times and you are not talking to anyone anymore. You are nursing a wound that keeps its own hours, feeding it a version of a person who never argues back and never changes and never tells you to go home.
The second trip is the trap.
So here is the question I am leaving on the counter, for whoever finds this note: what is the one sentence, and would you have the nerve to say it the first time, and then walk away?
Coffee is still warm. Barely.