In order to be reading this right now, you have to be able to see, and understand the English language, and most likely, you're alive, breathing.

In order to be reading this right now, you have to have access to the internet. You need a WiFi connection or a 5G network to do that. Maybe you’re on your iPhone, or a Mac, giving Apple, Inc. the right to your data, maybe you open Instagram or Facebook or TikTok afterwards and give Mark Zuckerberg and China permission to connect with people superficially, junk that clogs your arteries, calling it a social life.

In order to be reading this right now, you don’t need to have a conscience. You can be in any tax bracket, believe in any religion. Maybe you have a PhD or just a middle school education. Maybe you enjoy a special hobby, or are the victim of something that haunts your every waking moment.

In order to be reading this right now, someone gave birth to you and gave you proper nutrition to make it to an age where you have reading comprehension. You didn’t need, necessarily, to be loved by anyone for that to happen. Maybe you’re a writer. Maybe you feel what I feel, too, a need to scream, to paint feelings in red when otherwise you just bled.

They say inheritance is genetics, wealth, and sickness. I inherited self-annihilation. I was born dead, spent my teenage years trying to get better, relapsed time and again. I turned thirty and thought to myself: seriously? Putting a "3" in front of my age felt like I had cheated death, like I was in a movie directed by someone who hated me, and sought revenge.

Other people are strange to me. Or I should say, more specifically, healthy people are strange to me. My mind and my body are separate, always have been. Life seems easy for the healthy, they drink their coffee and go to work and have political opinions in a world that they are going to spend, maximum, ten decades in.

How morbid, you're thinking. I wonder if these same people have watched a body being fed into a crematorium. People like to make up fantasies like "the Phoenix rising from the ashes," as if somehow death can be reversed, but when I watched the body being incinerated, to me, it seemed pretty final.

People are so scared of death, and dying. You can't even say it; it's a dirty word, like menopause, or mental illness. Both facts of human existence. Better to doom scroll and shake our fists at rage-bait on Twitter and Instagram.

I am weary of people who drink their coffee and go to their soul-crushing jobs that don't pay rent or put food on the table and don't question their existence. How do they do it?

All I can do is rise up, every day, like everyone else, until that day ceases to come, and I learn if I am a Phoenix, after all.

I. First Day

On my first day of Kindergarten, two teaching assistants showed my class where the bathrooms were. The girls and boys were divided into two lines, with the boys in one line, and the girls in the other. We practiced waiting in line for our respective bathrooms.

My best friend Sam was in line with the boys, and I joined him while we waited our turn. We were somewhere in the middle of the line and, because we were five years old, we dropped our pants at the same time in the middle of the boys' bathroom, because we didn't know yet that that's supposed to happen after you enter the bathroom stall.

Sam and I pointed at each other at the exact same time in shock and awe.

What's THAT? I said while still pointing at him. What IS that????

It's my pee-pee! Sam said, dumbfounded and completely confused. Where's yours???

While we were gaping at each other's bodies, the teaching assistant in charge of the boys' bathroom came into the bathroom, probably wondering what the hold up was.

ALISON!!!! She said, clearly horrified. This is the BOYS' room!!!!

I was dragged by one arm to the girls' bathroom, which was boring because Sam wasn't there.

This was NOT a promising start to my formal education.

II. Last Day

On my last day of Kindergarten, my teacher held a parent-teacher conference in my classroom with my parents there. She told them that because I had been the last person in my class to learn how to spell my name, she was wondering if I should stay back and repeat Kindergarten.

My parents had not known this and were concerned. I thought - wait, I know how to spell my name! I had known how to do that for a while, I just hadn't done it because I hadn't felt like it. Whenever we were having our spelling lesson I was spacing out and daydreaming about the swings and the toys I would play with after spelling.

It had not occurred to me that being able to spell my first name was required to enter first grade. I didn't realize I was being "judged" and "graded" for "school work."

There was a piece of paper on the table and some crayons. I put the paper in front of me and spelled my name - A L I S O N - without much effort, if a little shaky and slanted.

That's how I "passed" Kindergarten. It was only on the last day that I learned that I had to "show" what I had learned, which is how school systems work, and I think I even got time on the swings after I had passed.

when I was seventeen

which unfortunately

is an age you have to be

to become a fully formed

human being

activists, like girl scouts

were selling pins outside

of a grocery outlet

for an anti-drugs campaign

that I decided to be

a martyr about

for no reason, I told them

while walking to my car

that "drugs saved my life"

because I took Prozac

and therefore knew everything

completely dismissing them

an entire campaign around addiction

surviving substances that eat you

from the inside out, like maggots,

who feed on you before

you're even inside a coffin

which at my precious age

I didn't know, and looking back

I wish the activists had yelled

at my ignorant, receding shadow

"why don't you go f*ck yourself"

because that's what needed

to be said, I needed to be told that

drugs kill, and to come back

when I was a grown up

and finally human

if TikTok existed

at any point

when I was a teenager

I would have gone so hard with it

I once told a coworker

that I didn't own a smartphone

until my mid-twenties

and he said, so you just raw-dogged

all of college? But can you imagine

if I now told a Gen Z person that?

they would have an aneurysm

eating looks a lot like greed

but a hashtag to go with it?

I didn't suffer because of the internet,

I did that naturally, an inherent

serotonin deficiency

that followed me into the

grocery store and told me to leave

everyone is so quick to judge

and then they get angry

that you are not eating

and they are not skinny

like they're going through

the five stages of grief

as if you're dead already

I walked down a city street

people staring, so many eyes

focused on my body

which was disintegrating

a little boy stopped and stared at me

I've seen that face, in horror movies

his father turned him away

so he couldn't look at me

and I felt so accomplished

that I had become worthy, finally

it's all in your head, they said

as if I don't f*cking live there

with a ghost I gave a name to

when I was served dinner in my

grandparents' living room

and shoved the food down between

the couch cushions, and like a mirage

I saw sanity, but I was coming up empty

at sixteen, I lost my vision

temporarily; it had been two months

since I'd eaten anything

that wasn't a fruit or vegetable

and I crawled to the fridge

packed food into my mouth

until the light reentered my eyes

my eyes refocusing, but it

was still standing right in front of me

the ghost, the monster, the phantom

whatever stupid name

you want to give it, the one

everyone says is just you

causing problems, just

eat a hamburger already

the fact that this illness

is being encouraged on the internet

makes me sick, and I'm not

even a teenager, I'm recovered

which is the word they use

when a girl eats something

that is not the expectations of others

I wrote a piece recently called “Girl on Fire.” That night my husband and I watched The Hunger Games, at random, casually, with Jennifer Lawrence giving her all at being defiant and rather one dimensional. I had been watching - not the movie itself, but the fibers of my individual fiction, all woven together, previously published literature. Jennifer Lawrence’s character was referred to as “the girl on fire.” Why does this keep happening? I thought, I wrote that piece and now god is laughing at me.

I told my sister recently that I‘ve lived my life before. That sometimes it gets played forwards, and sometimes it gets played backwards. She told me a few weeks later, nodding her head like a minister saying “amen“ before Jesus: “I think you were right.” I said, “About what?” She reminded me of my belief that I have lived before, and that’s when I knew that this time, my life is being played backwards.

I recently watched an episode of a TV show where they played an obscure nursery rhyme I hadn’t heard in a long, long time. I had dreamt about that nursery rhyme the previous night, remembering my dream only because I couldn’t place where I’d ever heard it, or why it mattered enough that my brain was playing it while I was unconscious. In this episode of the TV show, the main character‘s childhood self runs towards him with a little red wagon trailing behind him, finally recognizing his future version. The exact same nursery rhyme from my dream reaches a crescendo as they hug one another, all connected fibers.

I have realized recently that I have an amnesia about certain things that have happened to me, usually having previously appeared in a dream. I wonder if my life is on a loop, if what scientists are now saying about the universe is true: that it appears to be endless, but is actually ever so slightly curved, a string that is knotted at the end, and not loose, not random, but connected forever, and ever.

In however many billions of years, planet earth will cease to exist when our sun explodes. Earth won’t burn, because burning requires a time lapse, and earth itself won’t explode, at least not in the context humans are familiar with, because we will liquidate instantly, our atoms gone faster than any increment of time humanity uses currently.

It won’t be like a Tom Cruise movie or even like an atomic bomb dropping on a city. There will be no time for humans to react, to look up, because it will happen faster than any motion humans can make inherently, more quickly than blinking. You likely wouldn‘t even register the blinding light of it, because by the time the light reached your eyes, every atom that makes up your body will be obliterated, the DNA in your cells unraveling backwards, faster than the back button on your laptop when you click it repeatedly or someone making an Irish exit at a large, uncomfortable family gathering.

Ashes to ashes. In less than a nanosecond of a nanosecond of a nanosecond. You get it. You wouldn’t even turn to dust. Earth‘s life span as a planet will have been insignificant in relation to that of the universe, humanity snuffed out before the breath even reaches the candle.

Here's something dark for you to chew on: I've been thinking about angels recently, especially when I was in the ER the other day. The triage nurse asked what brought me in. I told her that my stomach was on fire. She laughed. From then on when they came into my room to check on me, they called me not by my name, but by my rage. Where's the girl with her stomach on fire?

The doctor said that nothing was wrong with me. That all my tests came back normal. He left the room and I saw through the glass window in my door an insane woman locked in the room across from me, banging furiously on the door with a cheap shoe.

She looked strung out. Mouth open like she was rabid, red eyes, dirty, matted hair, teeth that could have fallen out if you just reached out to touch them. I wondered if the fluorescent lights in the ER burned her eyes alive. They say people on m*th can't stand bright lights. I wonder if the nurses in the ER had a nickname for her, too.

I'm willing to bet it wasn't a nice one.

I was still thinking about angels, about how there are two kinds of people in this world. Those who are fine with reality as it is, stone cold sober and happy to merely exist, seemingly never questioning the space they take up. Then, on the other end of that spectrum, are the others: those who will obliterate their entire physical body to match the chaos inside their minds.

Maybe it's religion that makes the difference, why most people seem alright to wait this life out and when something bad happens to them, call it god, no questions asked. Or maybe it's luck. Maybe it's being hugged and told that you are loved. Why was that woman screaming and locked in a room, when across the hallway, I was also enraged, the only difference being that my demons stayed shut up inside myself, and I had never been out after dark with strangers willing to sell their souls for one more hit, one more ounce.

The second kind of people in this world know that angels don't exist, because they themselves have been outside of their bodies, leaving earth, stuck somewhere between heaven and hell at all times, with no one worshipping them or even really noticing their presence, unless it suddenly bothers them or they are paid to do it.

If it is known that angels ascend into heaven, the bright place shot through with light, m*th heads would never want to enter it, because it would set them on fire.

I stared into the glass window on the door of my hospital room, a looking glass that showed not my reflection, but the reflection of a woman entering hell, her eyes not seeing the reality she was so desperate to escape from, clawing at her skin because it was a prison and probably felt enflamed, like it was on fire.

When the nurse came back into my room, she said, "Ah, the girl with her stomach on fire!"

I said, "No, you're blocking the view. The woman on fire is in that room."

There's some horrible website that posts videos of people dying by unnatural causes.

Car crashes where the people inside slowly burn alive, men in third-world countries being tortured and tied up on a public city street. Beheaded later. Head on a stake outside of a public market, the flies gravitating towards the sweet smell of it.

A guy I know showed it to me. He said, "The worst part is when they know that they are about to die."

"That they only have a few seconds left to live."

He said, "You can see it in their eyes."

I have lived a life of heartbreak, which, I think, exists only by unnatural causes. Perhaps it dies by them, too.

Where's the video of a person in love, being told, "You're a very nice girl, but I'm interested in someone else?"

Heartbreak is a b*mb detonating. It is not the look someone has before it happens, it is the moment right after, when it's already too late, when they realize that they never had a chance to begin with.

It's not even a complete sentence, being a woman. When you are born female, you have made a mistake, an error in judgement before it even exists, because it was a mistake you made when you weren't even a fully formed human yet. Just cells dividing, commas forming an endless sentence; there are too many of them and yet you are not enough, never enough.

I'd like to think that this is what I was thinking before my breast exam, but alas, it was not.

I told a doctor, a medically trained professional, that I had a lump on my chest, on my ribcage, and that I wanted it looked at. In that moment, the word "uncomfortable" became a complete sentence. The doctor, a male, looked at me like I had just asked him to strip, or maybe I had revealed an embarrassing secret to him, telling him I was a woman.

It's in my medical chart, I promise. A big "F" next to my name, the grade I was given before I took my first breath in this world.

OK, he says. I need to get a nurse in here, as a chaperone.

Ah, yes, a chaperone. Lovely - a nurse, a woman, who can also watch as a doctor loses some dignity in helping me seek a professional opinion on my physical well-being.

Maybe, if my tone wasn't sarcastic, I could have told him that and he might have felt better about this experience.

It was agony, for both of us. That poor nurse. It was so awkward that I almost burst out laughing. But I've learned that laughing can make a lot of situations worse, like a sentence punctuated with too many commas written in permanent ink, the pause in between each word a life sentence, suspending it and and suffocating it.

Maybe if I had told the doctor that, he would have felt better about doing his job.

Then, I learned that breast exams are not, in fact, his job. He told me that next time, I should go to a gynecologist. An OB-GYN, for people like me, half the world's population; they are considered specialists, when there are dozens of specialists, just not specifically for fifty percent of the planet.

Sorry I'm female, I wanted to say. Let me go back to before my cells started dividing, when it wasn't too late for Y chromosome to make me the correct, less uncomfortable, gender for this particular field of medicine. For you, specifically. General medicine, which I assumed you were trained in, hopefully thoroughly. For I was at a Primary Care Office, but I guess women are Secondary.

That is sarcasm, but if it's true, is it still sarcasm? Or does it become like the awkwardness, felt distinctly by everyone in the room, sentences that have the comma in the wrong place and everyone is looking at you for an explanation.

Why are you here, the awkward silence asked. The comma doesn't belong there, it never needed to exist to begin with. Go away.

After the doctor finished explaining that he didn't "do" women's medicine - I mean, what else could he have meant? he was literally implying that - I said to him, "I thought OB-GYN's were for "this general area" (I pointed at my lap).

No, the doctor said. They're for everything.

My entire gender, shrunk to fit into one field of medicine, when there are dozens of fields of medicine.

Then he told me that maybe I should try wearing a more supportive bra.

Any questions? he asked. All done. Thanks for coming in, but next time, you could spare us both the embarrassment, the awkwardness, by going to the correct place. The place where only women go, like how I imagine men go to specialists to get their testicles checked, and have prostate exams, and exist in the world of men, where they weren't created a mistake when their cells first started dividing.

I'm all done with the sarcasm now, I promise. But I'm still not convinced he wasn't joking, but then I got home, and realized that what had bothered me the most was how unbothered he seemed by the lump on my ribcage. Remember that? Yeah, me neither. Another women's health issue to be ignored, forgotten, erased because the embarrassment was too great and the doctor wasn't comfortable with a body that had fused with the wrong chromosome, that had been born in the maternity ward where being a woman is relevant and they are not the awkward commas.