Remember That Time I Thought I Was Dying?

There’s no nobility in suffering,

I said to myself

Over and over

Until it was stitched into my brain

The same way I used to do

to holes in old underwear I couldn’t quite let go

In high school,

I would get cramps so bad I would double over mid-jumping-jack in gym class

I would sit in Spanish with 104 fevers and migraines that felt more like aneurysms

If I’m dying, I’m dying.

I used to say

Like I was wishing on a star

Or praying to my absent god

Silent—I looked so calm for a corpse—I would sit on my bedroom floor

tempting fate

Like if I couldn’t have religion I’d replace it with thinking my sticky insides were bursting like New Year’s Eve fireworks

Advil, ibuprofen, motrin

Once I started I knew I couldn’t

stop

(In middle school, I couldn’t swallow children’s tylenol

so I crushed it between

my teeth

and wondered if my gums would

bleed as a fit of flu-fueled delirium took me like auntie lolit’s imaginary house in a typhoon)

So, I would play waiting games

Let ear infections eat me from the inside, clog my eustachian tubes like if I stopped thinking about them they’d

vanish

Unexplained stomach pains?

(Surely I will die but I’ve

got to catch this bus ride)

If I said I didn’t need medicine, I didn’t need medicine.

Like I could divine it. Separate it. Will it away the way folks threw rocks at dying dogs.

Migraines, head-pounding, drumbeat tremors,

would go unanswered

I made misery my religion.

I would dream of my cousin cassandra’s exploding kidney and of men killing me

Of all the different ways

I could break bones and tear off severed toes

I would tuck myself so tight to the pain that I might as well have been fucking it

I learned to conflate,

instinct with desire

self-murder

crucifixion by my own goddamn

discretion

and misdirection

I would ignore brown-blood

periods like girlhood hadn’t plagued me my whole life

(especially ironic given how much I give and gave a fuck about women’s strife)

I would do everything in my power to die silently.

They could try,

and pry

but the flickering lights in the house were on and so were the padlocks

I’d simply say, “nah, I’ll be alright”

There’s no nobility in suffering,

I say now that i’m at my big age and act like I’m not still in the knows-fuck-all bracket of “teen-age”

And I’ll say it until

I believe it

Until I start dreaming

of it

So, I will take this non-recreational

pill

and sip