Scully's Diary Entry from "Memento Mori"

For the first time, I feel time like a heart beat, the seconds pumping in my breast like a reckoning. The numinous mysteries that once seemed so distant and unreal, threatening clarity in the presence of a truth entertained not in youth, but only in its passage. I feel these words as if their meaning were a weight being lifted from me, knowing that you will read them and share my burden as I have come to trust no other. That you should know my heart, look into it, finding there the memory and experience that belong to you, that are you, is a comfort to me now, as I feel the tethers loose and the prospects darken for the continuence of a journey that began not so long ago, and which began again with the faith shaken and strengthened by your convictions, if not for which I might never have been so strong now, as I cross to face you, and look at you, incomplete, hoping that you will forgive me for not making the rest of the journey with you.

In med school, I learned that cancer arrives in the body unannounced: a dark stranger who takes up residence, turning its new home against itself. This is the evil of cancer, that it starts as an invader, but soon becomes one with the invaded, forcing you to destroy it, but only at the risk of destroying yourself. It is science's demon possession; my treatments, science's attempt at exorcism. Mulder, I hope that in these terms, you might know it, and know me, and accept a stranger so many recognize but cannot ever completely cast out. And if the darkness should have swallowed me as you read this, you must never think there was the possibility of some secret intervention, something you might have done. I know we've traveled far together. This last distance must necessarily be traveled alone.

I have not written to you in the last twenty-four hours because the treatment has weakened my spirit as well as my body. Mulder, it's difficult to describe to you the fear of facing an enemy which I can neither conquer nor escape. Penny Northern has taken a down-turn. I now look at her with a respect that can only come from one who is about to walk the same dark path. Seeing her, I can't help but see myself in a month or a year. I pray that I have her courage to face this journey.

Mulder, I feel you close, though I know you are now pursuing your own path. For that I am grateful, more than I could ever express. I need to know you're out there if I am ever to see through this.

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