Dear Mel,

Thank you for saying that you think of me a lot. I think about you a lot too, as the one thing that I still hold dear, the last thread of warmth and compassion that connects me to my own humanity. That's why I need to cut you away, so that I can become that which I truly am, which I always have been, and which you have denied me from being for the past two years of the existential holding pattern that you called our love.

Please don't take this the wrong way and rush to the conclusion that you have done something wrong. The only mistake that you have made is not one that I can fault you for, namely your existence, and your existence is not particularly offensive to me, nor has it caused me any pain outside the scope of the suffering that I bear by virtue of the simple fact that I too exist.

In the time before Mohammed, when the people of this land followed the teachings of the Prophet Zoroaster, there was a tradition that our mortal remains would not be burned upon the pyre nor consigned to the crypt upon our death, but buried in the sky atop the mountains so that the vultures may feast upon our decaying flesh; an acknowledgement that we humans are not so removed from the circle of life that we have no further part to play in its sustenance after we have breathed our last. And when I die here – not if I die here, my dear Mel – but when I die here in this barren wasteland, I have resolved to give myself up to the earth in the same manner as the ancients did. My non-existent soul I place in the hands of a non-existent god, but my body I will bequeath to the scavengers. I have no desire to return to dust, for I am not worthy of the reverence of the funeral ceremony, of a slow and stately decomposition. No, let the carrion eaters tear me apart piece by piece, rip me out of existence as I was brought into it – slowly and painfully, in fitful moments and snatches of time, brought into being through the same brutally drawn out process as we all were. Let us do away with the fiction that we are a soul, a singularity that comes into existence at the moment of conception and ceases to exist at the moment of our deaths. We would do better to imagine ourselves as a union of thoughts, of emotions and experiences, as a vaguely defined concept that is constantly shifting its boundaries. There are no cells left in my body that were with me when I was born. My emotions change in response to my experiences, which are the expression of my thoughts, which are, however hard I fight it, influenced by emotions. There is no continuity in my being, that which I mistake for consciousness is simply an inability to notice change when you are completely immersed in it. In this sense then I will go on indefinitely even after my physical death. The point is that I will be alive when they start eating me.

I do not wish to give the impression that I seek to cast myself in the role of Prometheus. It is true that in leaving this world I intend to restore some balance to it, but not in the sense that my death will be an atonement, a retributive act wrought by the universe for some mark that I have left upon it during my lifetime. The universe does not care that I tread upon it. You, my dear, may take comfort in the thought that in countless other parallel realities I continue to do so, but it consoles me to remember that in countless others I never did. Perhaps I was wrong to say that it is the cycle of life that I will go on playing my part in. Think of the scavengers who will consume my body. The vultures too will die, and will be eaten in turn. It is the cycle of entropy, of inevitable death that we cannot escape.

The postcard itself was greatly appreciated, I infer that you are having such a great time at Niagara Falls that you could not find a spare moment to write me anything more than the most generic and derivative lines that amount to “I miss having sex with you”. I for one do not. I can derive a primal, animalistic pleasure in the act itself until the moment when I look into your eyes and understand what Sartre meant when he wrote that hell is other people. I cannot bear to think of myself as you must imagine me to be, but nor can I bear for you to understand me as I truly am. When you replace me, I ask for your future lover's sake that you face the wall when you make love so that you spare this moment of uncomfortable revelation until after he has satisfied his base instincts and already feels ashamed of his momentary weakness. The waterfall itself looks beautiful.

If there is any justice in this life I will die here in battle so you can remember me as a hero. I am not a hero, but if you were to remember me as such it would be no more of a lie than if you were to go on believing that I remain the same man you fell in love with.