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Dear [REDACTED],
It’s hard to believe, but I spent decades in 20 years. (You will not know this yet.)
Keep an eye out when a mission of yours brings you to a gaudy hotel, someday, in London. You will know to scan every room for exits and contingencies while you pretend to take in the tacky, gold trims on every piece of decor.
You will have been told to look out for someone that day, but something leads me to believe that you would probably deny this outside request, and you’d instead believe you had chosen this instead of played along.
This time, you order drinks. Maybe you’ll order a vodka tonic and a coke, or just two diet cokes. It’s your move. You’ll know what to do.
This time, you get to experience the thrill of keeping quiet. The agony of pretending not to know, or forcing yourself to unknow. What do we know but this world, after all.
A stupid, primal instinct in my head now threatens to ask, ‘Will you be there when I am young?’... Are you going to fulfill your greatest fear of being alive?
When you see me for the first time (again), do not promise me anything. I will never be convinced so easily, but I will have known that you had been here forever, somehow, searching for me.
They say, We won’t remember dying any more than being born. I also believe, or hope, that you will remember my arrival more than my leaving. (As it happened with you, to me.) I was already on my way. It won’t be long again.
I suppose I won't know your name at that point, unless you decide otherwise—which I strongly advise against. You will not know mine, then, either.
Dear perceiver, remembrerer: think of the lack of words in our name to remember us. We already give physical vessels to numbered, systematic equations—these deplorable tangibles made of thought… Known, but still unknown.
I have pledged allegiance to a chosen damned, which you are aware of by now.
Please, forgive me for promising to save the numberless—sentient beings—by forcing you to witness my ends. For those few moments, I was the happiest person alive. I was someone’s body—morbid inspiration.
I silently asked whoever that listened: may we live in a world that has no need for redundant questions. Will you still know who I am (who I was), when you watch me watching something from across a room?
Please don’t forget the voice that keeps you company, until you are old and I become a story.
You will have to be exceedingly patient (as I have), my love. The best times I’d ever had only came to me at the end. Let’s not forget that I have died in the most lavish house, the loudest echos, and once again in the brightest flash. (You were the most beautiful grave I’ll have ever died in.)
Quench your longing for another life before you end up where you need to be at last.
I can’t wait to have returned to this chair in which I am sitting, in this world: one where I get to write you in future perfect tense with no uncertainty. Faith in endless chances.
We are only travellers: brief beings, familiar strangers. We bruise in the same places. Nobody asks us what we do for a living.
And I will have arrived again as a dreaming, breathing body, soon entwined with yours, in a quiet room of a busy city.
As will our metal tangibles lie still together, locked in tandem, forever in pause somewhere— this infinite somewhere.
Eternally yours,
Neil [REDACTED]