Please write

Hi,

This is a letter from you in the past.  I'm writing to you because I don't know who else I can write to.  I can't help me.  No one else seems to be able to help me.  I've decided my only chance at survival is to do everything in my power to turn you into someone who can help me.  So that's what this is: a plea for help, and an attempt to change you.  There's a good reason, though.

I'm dying.

It's a slow death.  Give or take fifty years from now, from the looks of it.  At night, when I'm trying to fall asleep, I feel it creeping closer.  It watches me.  I can feel it.  I can't run away from it, and neither can you.  But maybe we can fight it.

I don't want to die without doing anything meaningful.  I don't want to just fade away.  You understand, I think.  And if I died today, if it caught up with me now, I'd be nothing but six months of mourning and a wooden box six feet under.  I'd fade.  I'd slip away.  People might remember me from time to time, but I would be a nebulous thing.  Shifting.  Mutable.  Not me.

I need to download myself.  It's the only way to preserve what matters of me.  That's what I want to do.  I want to capture the pure essence of Me and fling it into the world.  I want to make my soul and memories into a benign virus to infect the whole world.  That is the only way to defeat death: to create a part of me that isn't bound by the contract of mortality.

Please write.  Please be a good parent to the dogs.  Please treat our body kindly.

Please be someone worth remembering.

I don't want to die.

Natalie Watson, 01-23-2013, 8:07pm