The Manifesto

I am someone's daughter. Someone's sister. Someone's friend. But no one's mother.

I am the last leaf on my tree, the last stop on the line. I am the terminus. After me, no other.

No one will walk the earth looking through the same blue of my eyes, I will always be an odd branch on any spindly family tree. I am the alpha and omega, the beginning and end. The only of my kind.

My refusal to leave one after me is my gift to the world. I was here, but I will not leave another after me to prove it. There will be no daughter, son, or descendents to validate the eyeblink of time I walked these streets, these beaches, this earth.

Some have children so they can assuage the deep human desire to be immortal, to not fade and disappear from the face of the earth, be forgotten, for we as people want nothing so much as to be remembered, and we think that those who come after us, if they have our eyes, our name, our gestures, will remember. But they won't, and eventually they will be forgotten as well. It is inevitable and it is The Way.

I choose to create my immortality through the ripple effects of my actions. My choices are my children's blue eyes. My words are my descendent's names. When I am kind, when I extend an act of graciousness or consciousness, it changes the life of another, and he or she becomes different, and he or she in some way passes on my act, and so it continues, infinitely. In this way, I will never die. My time here on earth will have its legacy, the same as any grandmother. My name will be nameless, a wordless beautiful thought, a right choice, the wash of well-being over some unknown soul in the unknowable future, and this will be my bloodline.