If I die this week, it would probably be from exhaustion, or some exhaustion related incident. And before you freak out with your vigils or mourning, please, make sure that the projects and essays and exams I worked so hard on are still graded.

And then please, once those are graded, give them to my parents to remember me by, since these fragile accomplishments, these literary analyses and morphology exams are all I have really been able to do, if I die this week in my undergrad, without ever getting my shot at “the real world.”

Please have the professors’ comments on those grades be read at my funeral and printed in my obituary. Read aloud every “good point” and “source?” and “what does this mean?” and even try your hand at that really illegible scrawl in the margins there, because even that is a testament to my last accomplishments.

Plus, if I die this week and you tell the professors that I’m dead, well, they’re probably gonna go pretty easy on me, huh?  Would any of them be so cruel to not curve a dead girl’s grade? Which one of them is really going to say that her thesis is incoherent, or that she completely missed the project’s guidelines, or that the definition of morphology is “the study of the formation of words” not “the study of word formations.”

On second thought, don’t tell my professors that I’m dead. My legacy will be more honest that way. In fact, don’t tell my professors that I’m dead ever, let my unsigned name pass around empty on attendance sheets, let the professors scan the room for someone who will never return, let my Blackboard be filled with zeros, everything that I would have done or skipped, would have passed or failed, let them all remain the empty lifeless zeros of missed opportunity of a life cut short.

Or maybe if I die this week, just see if you can pull one of those urban legend rules off, like that thing where if a classmate dies in a test you all get A’s, so you can all get A’s on those projects and papers and exams, and my legacy will be that like, totally tragic girl who really conveniently saved you from your procrastination even if she couldn’t save herself from hers.