In Which Mallory Learns Three Important Things
About Herself as She Pinwheels to Death, Among Other Things

p.1
Dear Mother,
I do not regret the time we never spent.

Dear Father,
I am you and you are me. Who came first? The chicken or the egg?

Dear Self,
You must accept the fact that your imminent death is not and will never be glorious.

p.2
The worst part of realizations,
is they are cruel because
they cannot be changed.

Mine is that I will die
in exactly 17.12 minutes,
(my suit calculates)
whirling between
green, blue, black
speckled with
pinpricks of distant
light from a
different age.

I do not scream.
I do not cry.
I accept.
I am streaking
through time and
the atmosphere is
so close, filling my polycarbonate
visor with wisps of white.

I am glad that the last
thing I will see before
I asphyxiate is the
pacific ocean. I wonder
if fish look up
and wonder what it
is like to breathe.

p.3
I do not envy anything.
I am here, staring at my
entire life defined to
four numbers ticking!

(I have moved past
all things in life. I have
moved past staring at
twin tombstones and
I shall move even when
my synapses shall not,
forever freefalling into
nothing.)

the third thought
that cartwheels across
me squealing heavenly
mercy cries⸺
who will remember you?

The birds twittering under the shingles
of my roof, the squirrels eating the acorns
left on my porch, my posters hanging in
my room are all bits of my
existence and remember me in of
themselves.

I am real; my pain is proof of this.

p.4
00.10
there
00.09
is
00.08
nothing
00.07
more
00.06
beautiful
00.05
than
00.04
earth.
00.03
I
00.02
am
00.01
happy.