Written in response to Wilson's Heart (4x16)
The List
Some people keep lists of everything they want to do before they die. Those lists usually include things like "go to Paris" or "buy a sailboat."
Often people keep their lists in a safe place, often not even telling relatives and closest friends the things that were on it.
Often these lists were often started when their creator was a child or a teenager. Often it's even the original piece of paper, so some of the first items on the list were "buy a pony" or "go on an upside-down rollercoaster."
Often people looked over these first few items and laughed about their past ambitions, having achieved some of them with out even knowing it.
Often these lists were among people's most prized possessions. Often they are the first and last things people think about every day.
To Thirteen, that was all a load of crap. You didn't need a list. It was one more thing to obsess over.
And if you had one, you certainly didn't need to complete everything on it. People's goals change between the ages of five and fifteen, fifteen and thirty-five, thirty-five and fifty.
Who wanted to go get their eyebrow pierced at age forty, when it was the last thing they wanted to do, just because they wrote it on a list when they were seventeen.
Besides, Thirteen found that going through life thinking about all the things you hadn't done wasn't the best strategy.
Instead, Thirteen had a different list, a list of things she had done, a list that was much more impressive than most of the lists people wrote about things they wanted to do.
Soon she would be adding one more thing to here list, something that would seal her fate, to her at least, because of course her fate had been sealed for a very long time already.
What she would add the moment she arrived home would cause her to give up the one thing she held so dear, control, and after losing control she would have a long way back to regaining it. What she added the moment she entered her apartment would cause her to crumple up her list and drop it in the garbage can, because none of it would matter anymore.
She didn't know any of this yet. She was on the way to finding out. She was on the way to the lab.
And what she penciled in that night, with pictures flashing through her head of a bed with sterile white sheets encompassing a person who didn't belong, and people she didn't know standing in tightly knit groups speaking in hushed tones, and a man with no face sitting silently in a chair all alone, it showed that she'd never had a chance.
"Run the test."
Written September 6, 2008
