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The first one arrived on a Tuesday. Subject line: Re: Sunday long run — bring the gazebo poles.

I don’t run. I have never in my life owned a gazebo. I marked it as spam and forgot about it.

Four more came that week. Then a photograph: nine people in reflective vests standing in a car park under a sky the colour of wet cement, and underneath it, one line.

Aron, mate, you’ve gone quiet. Still coming Sunday?

That was when I noticed the spelling. I am Aaron Teoh, of Kuala Lumpur. He is Aron Teo, of Manchester. Somewhere in a running club’s contact list, a volunteer with a new laptop had typed one letter wrong, and for two months the edges of a stranger’s life had been landing in my inbox.

I should have written back and cleared it up. Instead I read.

He is a structural engineer. I am a structural engineer. He studied civil engineering and stayed on for a master’s in structures; I did the same thing six and a half thousand miles away, in a lecture hall with ceiling fans instead of radiators. His fiancée is called Elaine. Mine is called Eileen. He is getting married on the ninth of November. We are getting married on the twelfth of October.

For about a week I found all of this delightful. Then I started sleeping badly.

Because the more I read, the more I could see where the two of us come apart, and it was never where you’d expect. Not temperament. Not taste. He complains about the same beam-analysis software I complain about, and he is wrong about it in exactly the way I am wrong about it. We come apart at money.

He is negotiating a mortgage and worrying about the rate resetting in three years. I am not negotiating anything, because a flat near my office costs what I would earn in eleven years without eating, so we will rent, and we will keep renting. He has a student loan that leaves his payslip automatically and will follow him into his fifties. I graduated owing nothing, because my aunt sold a strip of land in Kedah. His wedding is forty-eight people in a function room above a pub. Mine is four hundred and ten, because that is what our families are, and nobody asked me. He is frightened of a nursery place that costs more than his rent. I am frightened of my father’s next hospital bill.

Same degree. Same job title. Same season of our lives, nearly the same name, and two completely different lists of decisions — not because we want different things, but because we were dropped into different spreadsheets.

That is the thought I could not put down. Two identical programs running on two machines, producing different output because of the conditions on the network. Everything I had ever called a choice started to look like arithmetic I had not been shown.

I used to think I was writing my life. It began to feel more like my life was being rendered. Inputs somewhere upstream — a currency, a birth certificate, an aunt with land — and out of the far end comes a man who believes he decided to rent.

So I tested it. On a Thursday in March I told nobody, drove to Port Dickson at two in the morning, and sat on the bonnet until the sky went grey. It felt enormous for about twenty minutes. Then I thought about how many men my age have done exactly that, in exactly that mood, and I drove home in the traffic with everybody else.

Last week I wrote to him. I typed the whole thing — the typo, the club, the master’s, the two weddings six weeks apart, and the question I actually wanted to ask a man wearing my life in a colder country. Do you ever feel run rather than lived?

I read it twice. Then I deleted it, unsubscribed from the mailing list, and went to bed.

The emails stopped soon after anyway. Someone must have fixed the address. I will never know whether he noticed me on the other side of the typo, or whether he has his own Thursday, his own empty road, his own grey sky he drove out to sit under.

But the letter I did not send, I keep coming back to. Whatever writes us, if anything writes us, it did not get that one. That silence was mine.

Like this bullshit? Consider buying me a coffee!