Dear Amanda,
There are approximately 80,000,000,000,000,000 leaves is this world. 10,000,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy. 200,000,000,000 birds on this planet. 7,000,000,000 people. And out of all of them, one is dying of Ependymoma. Me.
I know. I know. Everything dies, all things have an end, what goes up must come down. It's a natural thing, to die. I mean, every sentence has a period, every road somehow ends in a cliff. It just seems as if a brain tumor at seventeen seems like a misplaced period right in the middle of a Shakespearean Sonnet. By time they found the tumor it was too late. "Maybe you just studied so much," my mum said, teary-eyed, "that your brain couldn't take it anymore." It's pretty ironic that someone like me would die due to brain cancer. Because I am a type of person that takes Calculus just for the fun of it, who refuses to write colloquially, even in a text message, who spends a Saturday night curled up on her bed reading a book. I am the type of person who keeps the doors open for strangers, someone who saves every single piece of her schoolwork she's ever had because of the paranoia of needing to use it later.
In a few days the number of people who care so much about everything will dwindle by one. But will that change anything? Probably not, except for my family and friends who incessantly come to my room with food I don't want to eat and Hallmark cards I don't want to read. At first I was so angry that I wouldn't even get out of bed. But then I realized that I hardly have any days left,so why waste them as well? I at least wanted to have the accomplishment of graduating High School if not higher education. I told my friends to keep it a secret, after all, I didn't need the fake sympathy of people who didn't even know me. There were so many things that I still wanted to do. the whole nine yards(or is it five?) so many things I'll never get to do. I'll never. I'll never.
My life maybe has a small meaning, so I'll assume that my death will have a purpose, a meaning, something meaningful that's worth the disrupting period in the middle of a beautiful phrase. There's one thing I hope for. It's that after I die, people don't avoid my name like the plague. They say that a person dies twice, once when they take their last breath and the other when someone takes their name for the last time. I'm already dying early, so please don't let me die early twice! But...why me?
Amanda, I think its time to let you know who I am. I'm sure you don't remember me. That's the main reason why this is addressed to you. Because I have no weight in your life and I don't feel bad for whining. I just need you to know how important one of your brief sentences was to me.In fifth grade, my dog died. She was the only thing that I ever had the privilege to call my pet. Everyone around me in the lunch room were either oblivious or didn't care about my crying. I didn't know which was worse. I was about to run away, but in that precise moment you came and chose to sit beside me with your lunch tray. You said the wisest thing that I'd ever heard in my life (and I've read many books and listened to a lot of wise people) "Grief doesn't change you," you said. "It reveals you." Then you got up and left and never said another word to me.
You were my partner in English class last year. We were learning about semicolons. The teacher told us that the sentence could have ended, but it didn't. Instead, the author put in a semicolon where a period could have been but continued. For some reason, I glanced at your notes and saw that you had written "Life" next to the semicolon. I did not know what it meant then but later on in life, I did. I could have packed my bags and waited for death to come after my diagnosis but chose not to. As the author of my life, I decided to keep going. I know its not proper but I want my death to be a semicolon. I don't want to die there and my story to end. I know my soul will leave my body but I still want to be alive. As cheesy as it sounds, I want to be alive in the hearts of the people who know me, who love me. If Hitler gets to be remembered for being so terrible by generations, I at least want to be remembered for another 20 years. If you're going to become an author please write about me, continue the story from the semicolon, I give you the permission to do that. This life is short, even those that live past a 100 years, they're just a blib in the time continuum of this universe.
And the most important thing is that there is time and place to die, but this isn't it;
Rest well
Sincerely and finally,
Autumn
