November 9, 1997
I don't know when this journal became your's, but it has.
This is not the first time we have faced my death together. But, I fear it is the final time, and, my heart is truly broken. I don't want to leave you alone. I don't want to leave you, and be alone.
For the first time in perhaps my entire life, I fear the loneliness I used to embrace. I don't know what waits on the other side of this. What if my faith has been misplaced? What if God does not truly exist and all that I have to look forward to is another existence, but one in which I will have to live without you? I cannot bare the thought, Mulder.
If I am to have any hope of a peaceful death, I need to tell you that I love you. I love you, Mulder. These are words we have never spoken to each other but, as I lay on what may be my final bed, I realize with searing acuity that I should have told you long ago. You deserved to know, without doubt or question; I have lived more fully with you, loved more deeply than in the whole of my entire life. The world is dependent on balance, Mulder, and you have been my greatest joy and my most acute pain, my deepest faith and my strongest doubt.
No matter what you may believe, Mulder, you have never let me down. Not ever. This illness is not of your doing. You must believe, above all else, that I would never change a single moment of the last five years, even if it meant I would live a long life. Because it would mean I would have missed my life with you. If dying of cancer is the toll I must pay for the moments I could have only shared with you, then I accept this tax with a grateful heart. My only regret will be leaving you now.
I need to ask you for what may be a very difficult favor. My mother loves you, Mulder. She has loved you almost as long as I have. When I was abducted, she leaned on your faith, as I have so many times; she believed in you, that you would never give up looking for me, and that you would find me.
I need you to promise you will check in on her. Please, promise me you will call her. Take her to dinner. Talk to her about me. About us. I know it will be desperately hard in the beginning, but I need to know that someone besides Bill and Charlie will be there for her. That someone who loved me the way a mother prays someone will love her daughter will be there.
She needs to know I lived, Mulder. That I didn't miss out on my life because of the FBI.
Bill is so angry. He will never see beyond his pain, to look at you with anything other than the eyes of a betrayed brother. He will never believe my death is not your fault. But you need to understand him, Mulder. Bill did not get the chance to be the big brother he should have been. My father was never home, and Bill had to be so much more than just the oldest kid in a pack of Navy brats.
He had to be a substitute father, even a husband of sorts. Mom depended on him for so many things that my father should have been responsible for. He had to fix the things that were broken. When Charlie got into fights at school, it was Bill he had to face at home. When Melissa missed curfew, Bill was waiting up.
And when I had nightmares, frightened that my father would never come home, it was Bill who held me for hours. He was my protector, Mulder. And, he will never move beyond what he sees as his greatest failure; his failure to protect me from you.
Grasping for something to rationalize your existence in my life, he asked what I see in you. Why I follow you. My answer did little to help him, as I knew it would. What I told him, the truth of why I will follow you until I can no longer, is because I see inside you the faith I wish I possessed.
You have always believed in your pursuit of the truth, with precious little proof to show for it. You are faith without sight, Mulder. Where I have sought scientific facts and evidence, you simply believe. I envy your faith. I covet it. And when I have felt the lack of my own, during the hardest times of my life over the last five years, I have leaned on yours. Depended on it as I have depended on nothing else.
It is that faith that I will carry with me now. Faith that you will survive my death, and move forward with your life. Do not die with me, Mulder. Honor my love, my friendship, and our partnership by carrying on. Find the truth you seek.
And if that truth should lead you to the men who've done this to me - to us - then do what you must to bring some closure to those I am leaving behind.