I Wish I Didn’t Have to Go
by Cass Richards
As soon as she reached her empty bedroom, Seychelle felt her legs start to buckle from under her. Using the wall as support, she struggled to reach the corner and let herself fall on the dusty floor. Feeling feverish, her heart and mind racing, she tried counting in her mind as she took a deep breath in.
1…2…3…4
And exhaled slowly.
She knew she shouldn’t have come back to her parents’ home but, for some reason, hadn’t been able to think straight since she had found her way outside the Facility. Since she had opened one of the main building’s doors and had found herself out in the open, all she could feel was the burning eyes of cameras and drones lazily patrolling the skies looking above the city.
She felt her anxiety rise again and resumed her deep breathing, now focusing her attention on the small clumps of dust that were rolling around in her former room, disturbed by her presence. For some reason, she remembered the day when she was maybe six or seven years old when she had typed “are dust bunnies alive” online and had found out that they were, in fact, made of various debris all tangled together. From that moment on, she had always carefully picked them up to analyze them and catalog their content. On that day, however, they just looked dead and grey for they contained the rubbish of a life that was now over.
She sighed deeply, feeling somewhat calmer, and wiped her sweaty forehead with her red hoodie sleeve. She then took out her phone, which felt heavy, slippery and somewhat dangerous between her trembling, clammy fingers. She turned it on and, despite her fear of it being tracked, opened the texting app, took a deep breath in and tapped Amrita’s name-
Please… Please… she thought, feeling her heartrate accelerate again.
- and loudly exhaled when she saw that her last texts had remained unanswered.
Shit.
She felt her vision blur and an increasing tightness at the back of her throat as she read the messages she had sent Amrita in the hours before she was taken away for her final Scan.
Sunday 8:05
Amrita it’s me. Seychelle. I hope you didn’t delete my number already.
8:06
I know I’ve been selfish and scared. But I need to talk to you.
8:07
I don’t know how to put it, but you’re the only one who can understand what I’m going through.
8:12
I put a letter in our secret place. I really want you to read it. Please text me if you can get to it.
10:43
Have you found the letter? I really need you to read it.
11:00
Please. It’s important.
11:30
Please, Amrita. Get that letter and read it before I am completely gone from your life. I don’t have much time left.
11:50
Please, I hear them coming me for the Scan. I don’t think I can go through with this. I need to know you’ll read my letter when I’m…
She scrolled her unanswered messages several times, not wanting to face how utterly lost she now was, with no idea of what she should be doing next. Despite what she had done to Amrita (for her own good, as she had told herself many times), she still had had a little spark of hope that their relationship had meant something and that there would be a message, something, anything, waiting for her rather than this sudden void of loneliness and a slight ringing in her ears.
What now… she thought as she looked around the empty bedroom.
A car passed by outside, humming loudly. Seychelle got on her knees and looked through the blinds, wondering if there were people, somewhere, actively looking for her. She knew that what she had done was considered illegal and yet, she wondered how many people actually escaped the Transfer Station when they had paid for it.
She looked up at the clear sky and noticed a few drones going about their business, some of them carrying packages. Then came the shrill call of a police car, coming from somewhere in the distance and she felt a prickle at the back of her neck. The walls of the room suddenly seemed to be closing in on her, with no way out but the door.
I can’t stay here… She thought as she swiftly got up and wiped her sweaty hands on the front of her jeans. She walked to the door, the same one that her parents had always asked her to keep open and, one hand on the handle, took one last look at the room where she grew up.
Goodbye again, room. Thanks for the memories.
She found the letter exactly where she had left it, in the rusty, makeshift mailbox of her childhood treehouse. When she took it out, she found that it was warped and damp, like the various remnants of her and Amrita’s childhood that were still sprawled among the heavy-duty planks of the treehouse’s floor. She opened the envelope, took out the letter and held it like an old, precious parchment and found that she could still read it, despite the water damage.
Dear Amrita, she read.
I know you hate the way I write… but no matter how many times I tried to rewrite this letter I keep ending up with something that sounds like I’m an old spinster. I guess I’ve read too many of those spinster novels… or that I actually have the heart and soul of a spinster. Trust me, I tried to be funny and light (like your texts, you know, the ones) but I just… can’t.
Anyway.
First of all, I wanted to say that I am sorry for not answering your messages. I didn’t want to lie to you by saying things like “my parents are keeping me busy, preparing me for the big “Transfer” because you know as well as I do that, because of where we’re going, I won’t need my stuff anymore.
In fact, as of today, nothing remains of my present self but my own body and the clothes I’m wearing… and my phone, of course. I literally had to go through our garbage to find this piece of paper and this pen. Everything else was sold, given away, or destroyed, leaving nothing but shadows on my bedroom walls and that damned echo that you hate so much. Yes, I even had to get rid of my 80’s fantasy posters!
She smiled to herself as she pictured her room and Amrita’s 1990’s counterpart. Waves of bittersweet nostalgia swept through her mind, like the smell of burning wood that announced the end of Fall.
She continued to read.
Can you picture me on the bare floor, my bony body hunched over this paper as I am scribbling this to you? Can you imagine me in that room (the one in which you sneaked so many times) emptied of all the material things that, in a way, used to be “me”?
I actually cried yesterday when, after mine was cleared of everything and when I had to destroy all of your letters. Yes, I did scan them and sent them ahead of us, but it’s just not the same without the impression of your pencil on the paper, the idea of your nail-bitten fingers touching it and, yes, that intoxicating shampoo scent of yours that sticks to everything you touch.
Did I ever tell you it reminded me of the ocean?
Of all things, I wish I could have taken that with me to Cyrta.
She turned the page carefully and looked at the sky. Even though she had no idea where Cyrta was, she tried to imagine her mother, father and brother and herself, now pure data rushing through the vast emptiness of space, unaware that she was there, still on Earth. As much as she tried, it felt inconceivable that there could be two versions of her: one that was on her way to Cyrta and her present, confused fleshy self.
I guess that’s why there can’t be two of me, she thought.
She sighed, now feeling isolated and vulnerable, as unwanted questions about lodging, food and money started to skim the surface of her conscious thoughts. She thought about her data-Self again and how she was safely traveling in the darkness with her family, blissfully unaware of the danger her other Self was now experiencing and started to regret her impulsive decision.
She continued to read.
Anyway, the sudden absence of these traces of you around me now feels like a… cold emptiness inside my heart. Your absence in my life is like a void I need to fill by imagining telling you these things and talking to you one last time.
My dear Amrita, I wish I was six months older so that I could tell my parents to “fuck off” with all their Cyrta plans. I wish they had waited another six months so that I could actually make my own decisions. I feel like they did it on purpose, to trap me with them... But then again, if I had a daughter, would I want to leave her behind, never to see her again? Probably not.
So, yeah, I can’t really blame them for their decision. I guess I’ll blame society then, and this randomly chosen age of twenty-one to let us be our own selves.
But this is not what this letter is about.
Amrita, I wanted you to know that I blame myself for pushing you away when you wanted to be there for me. But more than that, I blame myself even more for never being able to really enjoy our time together, and for my constant complaints about our relationship. Today, as I am writing this, I only wish I could go for one last walk with you in that creepy, gnarly forest behind your house, or watch one last episode of one of your stupid 90’s sitcoms, laughing with you at the bad acting and rant about all those lame stereotypes!
You know what? I also wish I could spend one last day doing absolutely nothing with you.
Can you believe I’m actually writing this, when all I actually did was complain about us never doing anything adventurous together?
A warm breeze glided through the trees, shaking the leaves like clapping hands. There was already a hint of Fall in it, even though it was still months in the future. It would be another Summer and Fall before her data-self and her family would wake up on Cyrta. There was something pleasant about the inevitability of those thoughts, compared to the uncertainty of her own fate. She realized that she really wanted to experience another cycle of Nature and that, if that were to happen, she would do her best to enjoy every moment of it.
My Love, I am so sorry about everything I said, and how selfishly I acted when we were together. I know how much I hurt you every time I said that my life was boring and that I hated it. And yet I remember how excited you were for me when my parents said we were leaving for Cyrta, even though you knew we would never see each other again, and that our story had to come to an end. I know the news must have broken your heart and yet, there you were, with your bright, star-like eyes burning with joy for me. Even now I can’t understand how someone can be so selfless as you’ve been with me. I’m now realizing I never really deserved any of it…
Gosh, I feel like a total cliché! A 90’s sitcom cliché? You tell me.
But now I am terrified, Amrita.
Since my parents told me about the move, about the Transfer, I can’t stop hearing that awful jingle in my head, teasing me: “New planet, new home, new you!” and it terrifies me. I know I made a lot of people jealous when I announced that we were leaving, but if only they knew how quickly I would trade places with them. I don’t understand how anyone can be so excited about the idea of being uploaded, transformed into data before being cast across the galaxy and downloaded back into their clone.
Worse. I’m terrified about the scan itself, and something they don’t really talk about (although I think my parents may know about it, since they’ve been super evasive): what will happen to my body, to theirs and my brother’s, once our scans are complete?
Do you know?
I’ve done research, but it’s not clear. It’s as if everybody knows, but no one really talks about it. I know that I’ll get scanned for half a day or so, that I’ll be uploaded, and that I’ll wake up, seemingly instantaneously, on Cyrta in a new, cloned body… but what will happen to the body that is mine, here on Earth? The one being scanned?
Amrita, I’m afraid the scan is going to actually kill me. The real me. And that a copy of my Self will be sent to a body that will also be a copy.
Does that make any sense to you?
They keep telling us that by scanning our Selves we can live forever and travel across the universe, but I don’t feel that way because… well, they don’t actually “remove” your Self from your body, right? The scan is not removing anything to put it somewhere else. They are just… copying you and sending that copy away to travel between star systems. In other words, the person waking up on Cyrta will only be a copy of my mind in a copied body, thinking it’s still me, but it won’t be. Not really.
Seychelle looked at the houses and silvery buildings that, in the distance, rose like spears above the tree line. She tried to imagine people going about their lives, unaware of her own situation. She then tried to imagine her parents as they would, in eighteen months, wake up in their new bodies.
What would they say, what would they all think of her?
She then tried to imagine herself waking up on Cyrta and being told that she had escaped the Facility before being caught and terminated (because as far as she knew, that was now the only way for her cloned self to be imprinted on Cyrta). How would her other Self react to an escape she didn’t even remember? To the thought of her original body being destroyed? She tried to imagine what it would feel like to know that she had physically died, but couldn’t conjure any clear emotion. As far as she was concerned, she was born on Earth and that made her the one and true Seychelle. Since the “Cyrta Seychelle” would only be an imprinted clone, she would be a completely different person, and therefore unpredictable.
She continued to read, the words she had written now echoing her thoughts.
Amrita, as much as I try, I cannot believe that I am actually going to continue my life with my family on another planet because I don’t see any sort of continuity between this “me” who is writing to you, who loves you and misses you so much... and that clone who will wake up almost a full light year away on Cyrta.
I am terrified because I am now convinced there is no eternal life for anyone and that I’ll be, in fact, killed after I am scanned, and that my present consciousness will cease to be, my body discarded… while another Seychelle will wake on Cyrta believing she is utterly and completely me.
I know how crazy it sounds, but I also have this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that she will also love you exactly the way I do and that, by loving her, you will be in love with someone else, and that I will be replaced.
So here I am, laying in anguish in an empty room, writing to you because I think you will understand. But also, I think, because there is something in me desperately trying to survive through this letter, and maybe through you.
She heard a buzzing sound and saw a drone coming her way. She ducked away from the window and let it pass. More than ever, she realized that she needed to talk to Amrita, to see her, hug her. Reading the final part of the letter, she now felt as if she was talking directly to her.
My dear Amrita,
I don’t know if we’ll ever speak again, considering the distance that will be separating us. Maybe we will but I want you to remember that the person who will be writing to you, remembering you, may not be exactly me because that person, writing to you today, will have most certainly died.
But whatever actually happens… Whether I truly die or not, I want you to know that I will be thinking about you when they put me to sleep before the upload.
It’s stupid and corny, I know, but I’m telling myself that if you’re the last thing on my mind when I die, this memory of you will travel the galaxy and, hopefully, you will be the first thing that the other Seychelle will think about when she awakes. Hopefully, she’ll love you better than I did.
My sweet Amrita, I think it’s time for me to go. I don’t think I’ll have time to write again, at least not in this life, and definitely not on this planet.
I love you, Amrita, and I am sorry I didn’t get to spend my last days on Earth with you.
Yours always, from my last breath to my first, from the Earth to Cyrta,
Seychelle
She folded the letter and put it back in the box, feeling empty and hopeless. She had no idea what to do next, or where to go. All she wanted was to curl up on the floor of the platform and rest, for this treehouse was now the only place where she felt safe and, somehow, close to Amrita.
She turned her phone on, checked the unanswered messages again and texted the last words of the letter as a final farewell.
I love you, Amrita… and I am sorry I didn’t get to spend my last days on Earth with you.
Her heart loudly dropped in her chest when three little dots suddenly appeared on the screen, disappeared, then reappeared again.
She held her breath, waiting for a message to pop up on her screen.
…
Seychelle? Is that you?
Yes! It’s me!
I don’t understand, how are you writing this?
I escaped the Facility after they scanned me.
You WHAT?
Yeah, I know…
But now I don’t know what to do.
How on Earth did you escape?
I thought the place was secure.
I guess they assume people don’t leave.
I mean I literally walked out.
Just like that?
Well, I did steal a nurse’s uniform.
That’s so badass.
Yeah well now I’m screwed, so…
Seychelle. I can’t believe it’s really you.
It’s really me.
So what happened to “a memory of you traveling the universe”?
What? You read the letter?
What do you think?
But it’s still in our secret spot.
Well it was more secure than bringing it home.
Yeah. Makes sense.
So, what’s the plan?
The plan?
Oh my God, S.
You didn’t think any of this through, did you?
I guess not…
Why did you have to write a letter?
You could’ve called.
I don’t know…
It’s very pre-Internet 90’s so I thought you’d like it.
After you dumped my ass?
I guess I was always afraid of how you would react.
A letter was easier, especially after I was gone.
Yeah. Right.
Amrita… I’m sorry.
I know. You said it 15 times in your letter.
I guess I was afraid.
Of what. The Transfer?
Yeah.
And afraid of seeing you one last time, I guess.
What do you mean?
I didn’t want to put you through that.
Oh, so you wanted to protect me.
Cute.
But I don’t need protecting.
I know.
So tell me why you really cut me off.
What do you mean?
Come on, S.
I know you didn’t want to hurt me.
But that’s not all.
I mean I hope it’s not all
I…
Yes?
I guess I didn’t want to feel hurt.
You mean you couldn’t live without me?
Yeah. Something like that.
Your letter was so beautiful, Seychelle.
Why couldn’t it have been like that when we were together.
I don’t know.
You know how hard it is for me to say things to people.
It’s always been easier to write.
I know.
Even now, you’re writing to ask for help instead of calling.
That’s not why I texted you.
So why did you text me?
I texted you because…
Please, S. I want you to say it.
I need to know it’s going to be worth it.
I texted you because I love you.
Because I need you.
You? Seychelle? You need me?
I know they’re probably going to catch me anyway.
But I want to see you one last time before they do.
I want to hold you, to kiss you, to tell you how much I love you.
Wow… You’re actually making me blush.
I wish I could see that.
Yeah well. I’m still mad at you.
I would be too.
It literally took a Transfer.
And the idea of DEATH for you to tell me those things.
I’m sorry. I love you, Amrita.
I love you too, S.
So, what’s next?
I don’t know… I don’t have a plan. Remember?
LOL
What?
Nothing. You’re adorable
Impulsive yet introverted.
Sue me.
I’m going to be in so much trouble for this…
What do you mean?
I hope it’s going to be worth it.
Amrita. What do you mean?
You’re so hot too, so it’s not like I have a choice.
Why did you have to be so hot?
Amrita, stop that!
I guess I’ll tell them you bewitched me.
AMRITA!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Then, just like that, Seychelle’s consciousness left her phone and focused back on the real world where she had just heard a familiar voice, say “bewitched me” right before the words appeared on her screen.
She looked around, slightly confused. The warm breeze was still blowing, rustling through the leaves, and a hyper-plane was cruising at high altitude, the glow of its engines like a hot, white star. When she heard the voice again, coming from somewhere nearby, she recognized it and everything felt bright and light again.
A backpack was thrown onto the platform and, a second later, Amrita’s face peered from the edge of the treehouse floor, her large dark eyes like pools of shadowed stars.
“Honey I’m home!” She said with a smile.
“You found me…” Seychelle said, feeling the tears well up again as she realized how much she had missed those eyes and the slight gap between Amrita’s front teeth - her diastema, a word that, to them, had always sounded like some kind of jewelry.
“Your parents are going to be so pissed at you. It’s the ultimate Home Alone situation…”
“What?”
Amrita rolled her eyes and sighed as she helped Seychelle get on her feet.
“S. if we’re going to be on the run together, you’re gonna have to try to understand my 1990’s references”
“Okay. But maybe not now? I mean I can’t exist here and on Cyrta. There are probably people looking for me-”
“I know. In the end, there can only be one…” Amrita said, dramatically.
“Was that another quote?”
“Whatever. Let’s get you somewhere safe, shall we? But first…”
Amrita opened her arms and Seychelle instinctively let herself fall forward and into her lover’s warm embrace, knowing, without the shadow of a doubt, that she had made the right decision and that the Cyrta Seychelle would understand, and hopefully, envy her.
She took a deep breath of Amrita’s shampoo-scented hair and thought of the ocean and of distant places. She then looked up at the sky where she knew her other Self would be travelling for the next eighteen months.
“I guess that right now I’m the only physical Seychelle in existence. At least for the next eighteen months, right?” Seychelle said.
Amrita pulled away from her and gently stroke the side of her face with the back of her hand, sadness in her eyes.
“I don’t think that’s how it works, S. They’ll get you. Eventually.”
“Yeah, I know… But it’s not a reason not to make it count, right?”
“Then let’s make it count. Fuck you, other Seychelle,” Amrita said as they held each other close, feeling as one again.
About the Author
Cass Richards (they/them) is a francophone writer from Toronto, Canada. Their most recent stories in English have been published under various pen names in Interzone (upcoming), Metastellar Magazine, Cloaked Press’s anthology “Winter of Wonder”, JayHenge Publishing’s anthology “Phantasmical Contraptions & More Errors”, and others.
© I Wish I Didn’t Have to Go by Cass Richards. 2022. All rights reserved.
