The Things In The Air

Dear God,
When I was four years old, I remember, I asked my father why we didn't say anything bad about The Great Leader, even in private.
He took me down into the cellar and showed me something under a nanoscope, a tiny creature caught on a slide that looked like a robot.
"What is it, dad?", I asked, so innocent at the time, "A germ?".
"No. Its a listening device", he said, "The air is full of them though you can't see them; nanoscopic devices that float about in the air like motes of dust and listen to everything we say, no matter where we are. We even breathe them into our bodies when we inhale so you see there is no such thing as privacy, not any more".
I said I wasn't afraid of the Great Leader but my father placed his hand over my mouth.
"Do you remember the little girl in the apartment just below us? Suzy Kwan? What happened to her?", my father said.
"Yeah. Mom said she died of leukaemia", I said.
"It wasn't leukaemia", said my dad, "She said something against the State; she said she believed that God watches us from Heaven and the things in the air, the things she had breathed in, heard what she had said and they made her sick. They made her sick until she died".
I remember laughing.
"Oh you're making all that stuff up", I said, "No one can do that".
But then I saw my father collapse on the floor and he started going into convulsions.
My mother phoned an ambulance and they took him to the hospital but he never recovered.
I guess the state thought my father had said too much.
And now I've thought too much, the things in the air will take me too now like Dad and Suzy Kwan because they can tell if you're praying, they say, but I don't care if they do.
They say its stupid to believe in you; to believe in any omniscient, omnipowerful force except the state but at least, people say, you are capable of love and when the things in the air take me, well then atleast I'll be free