June 1, Rome

Dearest Diary,

Today, I've made a major decision: I am never going to die.

Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off. Their lives, their entirety, will be marked by glossy marble headstones bearing utterly false summations ('her star shone brightly', 'never to be forgotten', 'he liked jazz'), and then these too will be lost in a coastal flood or get hacked to pieces by some kind of genetically modified future-turkey.

Nullified. All of them gone for ever. Don't let them tell you life's a journey. A journey is when you end up somewhere. When I take the number 6 train to see my pedicurist that's a journey.

But wait. There's more, isn't there? Our legacy. We don't die because our progeny lives on. The ritual passing of the DNA, momma's corkscrew curls, his granddaddy's lower lip, ah buh-lieve duh chil'ren ah duh future. But what ah duh chil'ren? Lovely and fresh in their youth; blind to mortality; rolling around in the tall grass with those alabaster legs; fawns, sweet fawns all of them, gleaming in their dreamy plasticity, at one with the outwardly simple nature of their world.

And then a brief half-century later: drooling on some poor Mexican nursemaid in an Arizona hospice.

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'From the Diaries of Lenny Abramov' will be printed in full in Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2. To subscribe to Granta and receive the entire issue free, or to buy a copy of Granta 97, click here.