write me a letter because i am not going to be around forever

by dz

While I sit at my bed, my respiratory tract squeals like the death throes of a Tamagotchi. Three terminal instances hover in front of me. One displays a Bonsai tree growing slowly, rendered as ASCII art. Bundles of keystrokes punctuated with coughing, then gagging, then spitting. Remember to get it all out of you.

Cough, gag, spit. If you don't get it all out in 12 hours, you'll develop pneumonia. Promise you'll take care of yourself for me, okay? I know it feels good but you should really stop putting shit in your lungs. I know it's rich coming from me.

She lectures me about my electrolyte intake; without them, I'll pass out more frequently. Out of the blue, tachyons rip through the heart. Biomechanically-speaking, an adaptation to stillness along with violent jostlings causes internal panic, the controller is thrown down and it disconnects. Opposite organic light-emitting diodes, constraint-laden constraint, addling-riddled addling, the body's stochastic death splash.

Feeling is the main sense. You know feeling deeper than you are able to understand anything else, vision yields to body-sense. It rips into you like an extreme-ultraviolet pulse, droplets of proteomics-grade tin fired at 100 meters per second on their journey to become plasma. You feel your body let itself down; you let yourself down with your body.

She takes me to the urgent health clinic. The doctor says my lungs were defeated by way of a postnasal drip, and I've developed bronchitis. I get a nebulizer treatment, azithromycin, corticosteroid pills.

I get a loving polemic on how I should let her take care of me. We go back to her apartment, she gawks at the skyline over the Verrazano. She makes chickpea soup while her roommate shoves cup after cup of ginger tea into my hands. I try my best for them.

Deep in shell storage there is olfactory information from the first time we noticed the smell of a home. It is floral-sweet and lactic. Greek yogurt and lily, wet rocks and freshly-peeled citrus, on occasion it feels almost like looking inside.

Investigation reveals a simpler state of affairs: a shell can only see- its skin ripples with eyes. It worships only what it can be, as only objects can. The sphere is object-oriented; a mirror polished to subatomic sheen. All You Laminar Flow Lenses, we're all Looking at eachother in just one moment. We have just one moment.

There was our room, old wood and glue and the occasional vent of hot air from the kitchen directly below. Blank faces and curled-up bodies and papers and bug screens in the windows that we would look through every day and pretend like the whole world was a computer monitor. Sometimes I would pretend that the people on the street were looking for me on the other side of the screen. Looking at me from such a distance, I would be too small to fit in a pixel.

We are never sure if will feel better, that we are capable of the opposite of feeling worse. In 2022 we were housebound with long COVID. Mental fatigue was the most intense symptom, we could barely sit at a desk or focus for more than a half-hour. In that time, some online friends gave us their addresses. We returned the favor by writing them letters.

I came to know each person's handwriting, the quantity of text each thought to put down. Fragile light from defrosting spring suns bounced off details of dates, music they wanted me to listen to, bike maintenance advice. In that time we learned that those who care to send postcards and washi tape and pressed flowers are the most painful to disappoint; many years of shut-in-hood precipitate disconnection, I isolated, I ran away.

I longed for you my sweetheart stillness.

Most of all, it is horrifying to be the opposite of alone in this existence. The original sin of outside-ness sustains itself, untold thousands of optic nerves run ragged inside a vast sea of words spoken without speaking, things seen without seeing. It can be embarrassing to be like this, to pump the blood of a wound that cannot remember itself, a pattern etched in hundreds of millions of exposures. You are Ripped up and propagated in a cell made of cells, the first and last Recursive neuropsychochemical con job.

But I think me and my sweetheart are living life just fine.

Your smiling face is absolution. The connective tissue in my joints will give out, next year I may walk with my weight resting in your palm, like you do when there's a steep incline or I tell you my knee hurts. Maybe I will buy a cane. I trust you will make good on your promise to carve one out of a large branch the next time we're upstate together.

To those reading this, please write me a letter. Write a letter to a friend of yours. Write someone back. Write someone first.

As I sit at a relative's couch, my hair falls out, cuticle by cuticle. Telogen effluvium is a normal stress response. Maybe I'll still look girly with a pixie cut. I'm looking at places to apply for graduate school, hopefully far from where I am. Continuing always precipitates the reflexive fear that I'm not supposed to have gotten this far. Maybe this world will realize I've slipped past one of its filters and worn out my welcome. Whatever happens I'll probably be okay. As long as there are still letters to write.