Carved in Stone

I long to carve my name in stone.  To leave behind a physical manifestation that won’t disappear after I have done with my time.   Evidence that upon this ground I once tread, that from these waters I have drunk and that amongst these people I did love.  I want that millions (or maybe thousands) of years from now, when all records stored so precariously in this digital age are decimated and lost forever, there will be some remainder, some proof, that I existed. 

I imagine a new race of humans rising from the ashes of a world destroyed (by perhaps its own undoing) wondering at their good fortune to have a habitable place to live and slowly inventing and evolving.  And then one day, while out discovering, as humans are apt to do, they stumble upon the ruins of a civilization from time before they.  Amazed will they be that there were once humans prior to their existence and search for additional evidence, of course, they will.  And there, in those ruins amongst the debris and whatever we have built in 2020 that might survive whatever cataclysmic event that destroys all of us, will be the stone upon which my name is hammered.  And there-- I’ll have been.