Remember me, friends, long after my final breath, and ages since the day when my dim light once faded. Remember me whenever you begin to believe that you are breathing in vain. Breathing is a matter of belief in things to come — a belief that the world will carry forward and remain a place where life is worth remaining. Breathing is an assumptive, hopeful action, involuntary and instinctively indistinct, yet often distressingly strained. This is the place where I remain, this life, this time, this tidy set of reasons and miniscule mistakes. Remember that my breaths once drew me forward by the momentum of inevitable tides — and I coasted along, willingly or not, towards the promise of some grand revelation.

Remember me, friends, long after my final breath. Remember that there once existed a man whose heart beat against the same rhythm as yours — that he once laughed as proudly, roared as mightily, and had his heart broken as readily as any one of you during the span of his modest and unremarkable moments. Listen to your most personal motivations, your silent and unshared intentions, and know that I once felt similar things, and understood those notions as privately and as earnestly as you do today. Remember me, friends, and never forget that the commonality of experience binds us by unspeakable means.

Across all measures of time, our hearts shall bleed among tides of unlikely unison, and we are left no choice but to believe that tomorrow is a day worth seeing, that there is a reason to keep the human spirit from receding. Remember me, friends, for I once lived, and loved, and dreamed as honestly and as imperfectly as I knew how to, and was moved to tears beneath the vastness of the same stretch of unrelenting sky to which you offer your prayers, your songs, your sobs, your errant gazes, your wild cries, recollections of stolen moments, and exhalations of private sighs.

Remember me, friends, long after my final breath, and ages since the days when I lived my life with the irrepressible desire to believe. Remember me, friends, for I was once a man who lived and breathed.