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Just A Girl

i am just a girl.

i have boobs,
and periods,
and long hair,
and a feminine voice.

and it sucks
but that doesn’t change
a damn thing
(does it?)

it doesn’t matter.
it doesn’t matter if i wish
i wasn’t a girl
if the world
is going to treat me
like a girl
no matter what.

sometimes a girl
who hates being a girl
is just a girl
with issues.

transgender people
are eldritch abominations.
you live your life
and you’re fine
(you guess)

until you see someone
who breaks the law
that a man must have been born a boy
and you realize that everything
about you is wrong

and you go mad
not because of what they are
but because of what you are not.

“if you hate your hair, cut it off”
“if you hate your boobs, cut them off”
“if you hate your periods
and you hate your voice,
inject some miracle drug
into your veins”

but T is expensive.
clothes are expensive,
names are expensive,
surgery is expensive,
and some of us
can’t afford
to be trans.

i am just a girl.
and it sucks,
but so does life,
so you suck it up.

it doesn’t matter.
it doesn’t matter whether
i see a boy
or a girl
or something else
in the mirror,

because all the world sees
is a monster
who was once
just a girl.

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Forty-Two Seconds

Content warnings: Direct discussions of death and suicide, including an in-depth description of a suicide attempt. Potential self-harm triggers. References to car accidents, gun violence, and marijuana. Reader discretion is advised. If you feel upset at any point, please stop reading this story. Take care of yourself.

You sit in the back of the classroom, idly twirling your pencil between your fingers as your teacher drones on and on about “symbolism,” “imagery,” and whatever other bullshit English teachers care about. Behind her is a projector screen, displaying a slideshow presentation with bullet points too small to be readable. The girl to your right is hunched over her notebook, writing with a black gel pen with a serious expression on her face. You squint at the open page. She’s actually taking notes.

To your left is the window, and you look away from your classmate to peer outside. It’s a beautiful day. The sky is blue, and there isn’t a single cloud to be seen. You’re on the third floor, so you can clearly see the school courtyard. It’s mostly empty, save for a group of four girls sitting on a bench together. You squint at their faces. They look like they’re laughing. You wish you were out there, sitting in the fresh air, feeling the gentle spring breeze against your face, instead of sitting here in this miserable—

“—are you here with us?”

You snap your head forward. Your teacher is standing in front of your desk, staring down at you. You stare back blankly at her.

“You were absent for two weeks from class, and this is how you’re behaving? How are you going to catch up with the lesson material if you’re not paying attention?” She taps her finger on your empty desk. “You don’t even have a notebook out!”

The entire class is staring at you. You can see, out of the corner of your eye, two boys on the other side of the classroom whispering to each other. You continue staring at your teacher, who sighs loudly.

“I understand that you were sick, and that your parents met with the school to excuse your absences, but you still need to put in the extra effort to catch up,” she says. “Try to ask one of your classmates if they can give you the notes for the past two weeks.”

She turns around and walks back to the front of the classroom, her shoes clacking against the linoleum floor. “Anyways, back to my point before I was interrupted…”

The girl next to you leans towards you. “I can lend you my notes later if you want,” she whispers.

As much as it feels like this girl is offering because she’s a teacher’s pet, or because she’s looking down on your lack of academic prowess, you’ve seen her at lunchtime, and she’s as courteous in the cafeteria as she is in the back of this classroom.

Still, you take a couple deep breaths before turning to her with the sincerest smile you can muster. “Sure, thanks. I appreciate it.”

She smiles at you, before turning to face the teacher again. You exhale, relieved. She didn’t notice how badly you wanted to snap at her.

You reach down into your backpack and rummage around, before pulling out a blue notebook with “math” written on the cover in black permanent marker. You open it. The first page has a few equations scribbled on it. You flip to the next page. It has the date “December 3rd” written in the top right corner in pencil, and nothing else. You flip your pencil and do your best to erase the date, but instead of disappearing, it smudges until the small writing has turned into a large, ugly gray blob.

You give up and write today’s date in the top left corner, before looking up towards the front of the class to see if you can follow what your teacher is saying.

“...the ticking clock and the raven flying outside of the window are both good examples of the author’s use of symbolism to foreshadow his death. I know it may be hard to imagine a world without our timers, but the use of symbolism tells the reader that he is about to die without showing a single timer reaching zero.” She raises her arm and taps her cashmere wrist cuff for emphasis. “The belief that timers are a countdown to one’s death is unproven, although many people believe in their significance. Regardless, timers are an overdone cliché. I’m sure you’ve all seen it in at least one movie.”

You try not to wince as the rest of the class nods. The last thing you want to do is discuss timers in class. You’re tempted to stand up and walk out right there. But you know that everyone—your parents, your teachers, your therapist—is doing their best to ensure that you graduate high school. You should at least try not to fail your 12th grade English class.

“For the last ten minutes of class, I want us to connect today’s lesson to yourself. In pairs, I want you to discuss death in your own lives.”

Your teacher taps the spacebar of her keyboard. Unlike the previous slide, which was unreadable from the back of the classroom, this slide has three questions typed out in large bolded letters.

“What factors do you think will play into your own death? If you believe that your timer predicts when you will die, what do you think will cause your death? If not, when do you think you will die?” your teacher reads out loud.

You lied. Almost everyone is doing their best to make sure you graduate. Your English teacher, on the other hand, is doing her best to make her class as unbearable as possible.

You itch to fidget with your black elastic wrist cuff, roll the stretchy fabric between your fingertips, but you restrain yourself. You don’t want the cuff to accidentally fall off.

Someone is calling your name. You turn right and face the girl next to you. The classroom is filled with quiet chatter, presumably discussing your teacher’s question. As she starts sharing her thoughts on your teacher’s question, you try your best to remember her name. Your memory is only drawing up blanks, though, and it’s hard to think clearly over the buzz of the room.

“—so I probably still have a long life ahead of me. What do you think?” she asks. You internally jolt as you realize that you did not process a single word she just said. You open your mouth, hoping that you can come up with something intelligent to say, but no words come out. She probably thinks you’re ridiculous, your mouth gaping slightly open like a fish, your eyes staring blankly into hers.

“I don’t know.” You carefully control your face to avoid grimacing at your own blunt response. It’s too close to your true thoughts on the question for your comfort. You hold your breath and hope she doesn’t notice the way your right hand is tightly gripping your wrist cuff.

She puts on a polite smile, the corners of her mouth turning upwards without revealing even the slightest hint of her teeth. “That’s understandable. Thinking about our deaths is a bit… personal, isn’t it?”

‘Personal’ is the understatement of the century. “It’s super intrusive, and also really fucking morbid. Why the hell are we discussing this in a high school English class?”

“Well…” she pauses as she puts her right pointer finger against her chin, showing off her colorful knitted wrist cuff. “I don’t know. It’s an interesting question to think about, even if it is a bit much to talk about for a five-minute discussion.”

“Well, no shit, Sherlock. It’s such a sensitive topic—”

You’re getting too close to the truth. You need to control yourself. Your therapist always tells you to take a deep breath whenever you feel overwhelmed, so you pause your sentence and let fresh oxygen fill your lungs before trying the sentence again.

“It’s such a sensitive topic, and there’s so much nuance that it’d be impossible to discuss it in such a short amount of time. Besides, it’s barely related to the book itself. Why is she fixating so much on the death motifs, when the entire story is about the importance of treasuring the time you spend when you’re alive?”

Your classmate’s eyes widen. “You actually read the book?”

You snort. “Of course I did. This is one of my favorite novels.” You force your lungs to exhale in a short burst that’s almost like laughter. “Just because I don’t like English class doesn’t mean that I don’t like reading.”

She laughs in response, her eyes crinkling into a smile. This time, you can see her teeth.

“That makes sense. Between you and me, I don’t think our teacher is doing a good job with teaching this book, either. She completely misinterpreted the symbolism in the story, like the bird imagery in the death scene. The raven is accompanied by a white dove, which she skipped over entirely. Since the dove is supposed to be a symbol of new beginnings, it probably represents how his death was a peaceful and fitting end for a life well-lived. Not to mention—”

“Okay, everyone, quiet down,” your teacher announces from the front of the classroom.

Your classmate immediately turns forward, pen in hand, ready to take notes. You feel like snapping again, but this time at your teacher for interrupting your classmate. Although you doubt that she connects with the themes of the novel any more than your teacher does, she was a lot more accurate with her analysis.

Would she have listened to what you had to say? You imagine yourself explaining your own thoughts on the book. Then you imagine your classmate’s polite smile, her pointer finger resting against her chin, her knitted wrist cuff brightly on display for the whole world to see.

She would not have understood. What normal high schooler would? In fact, what normal person would? Who could ever understand you?

For a split second, you try to dig your nails into your wrist. Instead of sharp pain, you feel the muted pressure of your fingertips digging into the fabric of the elastic wrist cuff.

You cannot let the fabric break now.

You release your wrist and dig your nails into your palm instead—not hard enough to draw blood, but enough to distract you from the dull ache in your chest.

In the haze of your thoughts, a voice breaks through: “What did you discuss?”

Your head snaps up. Your teacher is staring directly at you. The rest of the class is staring at you. The girl next to you is staring at you, too, and unlike the rest of the class, her eyes are filled with something closer to sympathy than judgment.

It occurs to you that you’re vibrating. Your hands are firmly hidden under your desk, but your blood runs cold and the room swims around you. Everyone is waiting for an answer you don’t have.

You open your mouth to say something, anything, and the ear-splitting sound of a bell rings at that exact moment. The rest of your classmates scramble for their bags.

“Saved by the bell,” says your teacher. “I’ll make sure to call on you first next class.”

You fail to shove your notebook into your backpack for a few seconds before the pages crumple in a loud crunch. You pick up your bag and sling it over your shoulder in one fluid motion, ignoring the dull pain of your heavy backpack hitting your spine.

“Remember that you have a paragraph due tomorrow,” your teacher announces, as you rush to the classroom’s back door, ignoring your classmate turning towards you to say who-knows-what. You swing open the door and stumble out of the classroom, nearly barreling over another student in the already crowded hallway.

You know you have another class to get to, but you still find yourself in the school bathroom. Through the haze of smoke and the overpowering smell of weed you can see a group of teenagers huddled by the sink, but you ignore them as you stumble into the first stall and lock the door. You’re shaking violently, now, and in the privacy of the bathroom, you don’t bother hiding it.

In, out. In, out. You gently trace the outline of your fingers, ignoring the angry red marks covering your palm as you try to get your breathing under control.

You are in the bathroom stall. There’s wet toilet paper stuck to the ground, droplets of piss on the toilet seat, a broken toilet paper holder, a graphite dick doodled on the stall door, and bright fluorescent lights above you. You can feel the pressure of your fingertips gently brushing your hand, the rough texture of your jeans rubbing against your legs, and the soft elastic fabric resting against your wrist. You briefly stop tracing your fingers to pinch your elbow, and count the dull pain as a fourth thing that you feel.

Outside, you can hear the group of teenagers loudly complaining about some party they went to over the weekend, the buzz of the lights, and the quieter sound of toilet water gurgling. The scent of weed is overpowering, but you can still faintly detect the piss smell that all school bathrooms seem to have despite it. You need to leave before you get a headache from the secondhand smoke.

But before you leave, you need to check. You stick out your leg and use your foot to push and pull at the door. It stays locked. You still hesitate, though, before pulling up your wrist cuff slightly—not enough to take it off entirely, but enough to see the numbers printed on your wrist.

00:07:43:36. Seven hours, forty-three minutes, and thirty-six seconds. Seven hours, forty-three minutes, and thirty-six seconds of your life. Seven hours, forty-three minutes, and thirty-six seconds until you die.

You pull down your wrist cuff, concealing the timer that knows you better than you know yourself, spin around, and kick the large button against the tiled wall. The toilet loudly flushes behind you as you open the door, wash your hands, and exit the bathroom.

Your teacher’s questions swirl around your head as you walk home from school. Earlier that day, you had left your earbuds at home in your rush to get to class on time, so you have no music to accompany your thoughts as you briskly stride down the sidewalk.

Around you are the sounds of teenagers talking and laughing. Even three blocks away from your school, the people out and about are mostly high schoolers, although every now and then, you pass by an adult walking in the opposite direction from the waves of students on their way home. It’s a nice day outside—sunny, with a gentle breeze preventing it from being too hot—but the dull ache in your chest makes it hard to even breathe.

When do you think you will die? Even though the link between death and timers is unproven, you know what the timers count down to. You know for sure that you are going to die tonight, in roughly five hours from now, just as surely as you can see the blue sky, hear the sounds of passing cars, smell the faint scent of cigarette smoke that permeates the city.

What factors will play into your death? You’re tempted to laugh out loud, but you know that there are too many people out and about who would give you strange looks.

Your teacher, sternly glaring at you as she taps her finger on your desk. The dull ache in your chest, spreading to your limbs. The sinking feeling in the periphery of your mind. Your classmate, smiling at you—not the real smile she gave at your joke, but the polite one she gave when you exposed your true self for the briefest of moments.

You think back even further, to the two weeks that you were absent. Vivid memories of being curled in a ball on your bed, too exhausted to even sleep, body aching and tongue as dry as the Sahara, fill your mind. You were so sick that your parents forgave your behavior and your teachers excused your prolonged absence from school. Even so, all you could do was stare at your timer for hours on end, watching as the seconds slowly tick down.

Although you’ve regained some of the energy you once had, all you can think about is how much time you have left. Why are you even bothering with this façade of normalcy in the face of your certain mortality?

More importantly, how will you die?

You slow to a stop at a red light. It’s a busy intersection, with five lanes of traffic rushing by at speeds barely below the speed limit. As you watch the cars pass by in blurs of color and sound, you’re tempted to continue walking forward until one of them hits you and you’re turned into a flattened mess of blood and guts on the asphalt.

But you shouldn’t. You have about five hours left on your timer. Although you’ll be in pain no matter what, you’d at least like for your parents to have a pretty corpse to bury. Plus, the driver who hits you would be permanently traumatized. There would likely be a messy legal battle over whether the driver should be convicted of manslaughter, reckless driving, or if they had no responsibility for the cruel hand that the Fates had dealt you.

Not to mention that the driver could always slow down before hitting you. And it would be so terribly awkward, having to lie through your teeth to avoid getting thrown into a psychiatric hospital for trying to die on your own terms instead of your timer’s. You want to avoid an involuntary hospitalization at all costs.

The cars at the intersection slow to a stop, and your light turns to the walk symbol. Still, you look both ways before crossing the street. You never know who’s not paying attention.

The thought of death doesn’t leave you, however. Different causes of death drift lazily into your consciousness, making their presence known in your mind. What if your carbon monoxide detector broke, and you died from carbon monoxide poisoning? What if you drank a glass of bleach instead of water? What if you were shot by a gun? What if you accidentally stabbed yourself? What if you fell into the river at the nearby park and drowned? What if you electrocuted yourself with a hair dryer?

You quickly eliminate each of these causes just as quickly as you think of them. The carbon monoxide detectors in your apartment building got their yearly check last month and would go off if they were damaged since then. Your parents don’t keep bleach in the apartment because your family washes their clothes in the laundry room in your building’s basement. Gun violence is impossible to predict, but statistically speaking, your odds of dying from gun violence are less likely because your family does not own any firearms. You would have to stab yourself in a fatal place in order to die from a knife, and even then, it would take some time for you to bleed out. The nearby river at the park is shallow and you can swim. Nobody in your family uses a hair dryer—you towel your hair and let it air dry after you shower. The only way you could electrocute yourself with a hair dryer would be if you went out of your way to buy one.

You’re approaching the base of your apartment building. It’s ten stories tall and made of faded red brick—neither the tallest nor the newest building, but not the shortest nor the oldest building, either. You slow down and crane your neck to look at the top of the building. Ten stories is still pretty high up. Ten stories is still a long way to fall. And now that the thought has crossed your mind, you can’t ignore it.

What if you fell from the roof of your apartment building?

“How was school?” your mother asks.

You finish swallowing the food in your mouth before answering. “Alright.”

Your mother looks at you with a raised eyebrow, but doesn’t push it. You’re grateful. She hasn’t always known when to pry and when to let things go, but she’s become less forceful over the past few weeks.

Dinner is Chinese takeout from the restaurant two blocks away from your apartment. It’s good for the price you’re paying, meaning that it’s not very tasty, but it’s edible enough. Besides, there’s something comforting about the greasy mushroom lo mein noodles.

You’d be okay if this was the last thing you ate before you died.

You wish your father was here, to enjoy this meal with you and your mother, but he’s working late tonight and won’t be back until eight. Given how volatile traffic can be, your timer will run out first. You’re not sure how you feel about that, but thinking about it makes the ache in your chest grow bigger, so you try focusing on something else instead.

“How’s…” Your mother struggles to find the correct words before she gives up in favor of tapping her elastic wrist cuff.

You shrug. “Alright.”

“Oh, honey…” your mother smiles with watery eyes, before walking over and wrapping her arms around you tightly. “I’m so glad that it miraculously changed at the last second. Our prayers have been answered. The Fates have been merciful. We should thank the Gods.”

You let yourself sink into her embrace, the knowledge inside you burning into your chest like the numbers branded into your wrist. She could never understand the truth. She could never accept the truth.

The merciful Fates she always spoke of, the Gods she wanted to thank… you’d bet that they’re sitting on their high thrones above the mortal realm, watching and laughing at your measly existence. If the Gods and Fates are real, they haven’t done a single damn thing to your timer.

After an eternity, your mother lets go of you and inspects your plate. “Good. You’re eating more than you were a week ago. You need to get your strength back. I know your timer says you’ll be alive, but I also want you in good health too, alright?”

You don’t trust your voice not to betray you, so you just nod. Luckily, your mother seems too absorbed with hiding her tears to notice.

“I’m going to go run some errands,” she says. “Peaches are starting to go in season, so I’ll buy some of those. I’ll be back in a couple hours, okay? Call me if you need anything.”

“Okay,” you reply, turning back to your plate.

Your mother walks out of the apartment, leaving you behind. Once you’re sure she’s gone, you carefully lift up the elastic of the wrist cuff and peek underneath.

00:02:29:52. Two hours, twenty-nine minutes, and fifty-two seconds left. There’s not much time left. There’s too much time left.

You let the elastic snap back into place and twirl another long noodle between your wooden chopsticks.

In a last-ditch attempt at normalcy, you decide to do your homework.

You look at your list of incomplete homework assignments and have to resist the urge to bash your head into your desk. You know you missed two weeks of school, but this is at least a month’s worth of worksheets, problem sets, and paragraphs you need to complete, not to mention all the make-up quizzes and tests you need to study for. On top of that, you have a make-up project that you need to do because you missed out on a group project.

At least you don’t have to worry about homework when you’re dead.

But no, you’re supposed to graduate 12th grade in two months from now. Once you’re out of school, you can go find an easy job in retail or something, and never have to worry about schoolwork ever again.

And then you can work for eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year at a deadbeat minimum wage job until you keel over and die.

You lift up the corner of your wrist cuff to check your timer again. 00:01:54:57. It’s like watching honey drip to the bottom of a bottle, the way that time seems to slow down as you stare at the seconds going down.

You should start your homework.

Your English teacher has assigned a paragraph for tomorrow’s class, and although you dislike your teacher, it should be an easy assignment. Not only have you already read the book, but you actually remember it because you enjoyed it so much. Your teacher’s interpretations of the book are horrific, and you know you’ll probably get docked points because of your poor writing skills or differing interpretation, but partial credit is better than no credit at all. You won’t even get docked late points for it, since the paragraph is due tomorrow at the beginning of class.

Resolved, you open your laptop, before remembering that your teacher refuses to let anyone in her class type their homework assignments—probably because she enjoys watching her students suffer. There’s no difference between typing and handwriting a homework assignment in this day and age, but your teacher is one of those people who believes that technology is the root of all evil. She probably also wants an excuse to dock points from students for having poor handwriting. You can’t have both legibility and handwritten work, but somehow she thinks that your messy paragraphs are from lack of trying, not lack of fine motor control.

To be fair to her, it’s not as if you’re trying particularly hard. What’s the point of attempting such a useless exercise in futility?

Then again, the fact that you’re even attempting this paragraph, with less than two hours left in your timer, shows how far you’re willing to go in the face of the futile.

So you fish out a piece of fresh looseleaf from your drawer, pick up the one mechanical pencil that you own, and write down your name and the date.

It then occurs to you that you don’t remember what you’re supposed to be writing about. You know that these paragraphs are supposed to be reflective of the work you’re doing in class, as well as the book you’re reading, but you were barely paying attention today. Sure, you were listening to the last ten minutes of class, but there was a whole forty minutes of book discussion that you tuned out before that. You hope she’s at least had the decency to upload the prompt online.

You open your laptop again and type in the name of her webpage. Luckily, the assignment is listed as “Preclass Reflection #102.” The fact that she assigns a paragraph before every class is still absolutely mindblowing to you. The fact that you’ve missed over a third of them is even more astounding. You click on the assignment link and scroll down to the assignment description.

“What factors do you think will play into your own death? If you believe that your timer predicts when you will die, what do you think will cause your death? If not, when do you think you will die?”

Literally what is this teacher’s deal? What is her problem with you? Why the hell does she care?

You pick up your pencil, and angrily scribble onto your looseleaf paper:

One of the factors that will play into my death is how stupid your class is and how annoying you are. You constantly get on my ass about my missing homework even though you KNOW for a fact that I was out for the past two weeks. You don’t even know why. I could’ve gotten hit by a car or some shit and been out for a month, did you think about that? Do you think about anything outside of yourself? Not to mention how fucking awful you are to me all the time. I wasn’t paying attention in class today, sure, but that’s because it’s difficult to focus on school after everything that’s happened over the past month. And that’s without all the bullshit late work you’ve assigned me over the two weeks I missed. I was participating and doing work for the first month when I was still trying to graduate senior year, but no, you don’t give a fuck because I actually had opinions about the books we were reading instead of just blindly listening to whatever you said.

But what will cause my death will be your stupid ass writing prompt. What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you making high school students think about this sort of thing? Have you considered why it’s taboo to talk about death and the timers? Hey, wouldn’t it be crazy if one of your students has a timer that’s gonna run out soon? It’s not your place to assume that everyone’s timers are gonna last for a long time. Just because we’re young doesn’t mean we can’t die young. Sure, there’s a handful of people who die before their timers run out, but there’s never been a single person who’s lived to see their timer hit zero. With that in mind, can you, in good conscience, force a bunch of high schoolers to think about if their timers mean that they’re gonna die? Can you force a bunch of high schoolers to think about how they’re gonna die?

So I’m sure you’re wondering when my timer is gonna run out. Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve just checked, and it reads 00:00:49:31. So I have forty-nine minutes and thirty-one seconds before I’m out of time. You probably wondered why I wasn’t in school, right? That nosy busybody attitude of yours must have been soooooo furious when my parents refused to elaborate for you. Well, now you know. I’m supposed to die in less than an hour from now, and after two weeks curled up in bed crying my eyes out over it, I decided to try school one last time. Not as if you give a fuck about anyone that isn’t guaranteed to go to a four-year college and graduate with a bachelor’s degree.

But here’s the kicker, since this isn’t enough for you. I lied about my cause of death. Sure, your writing prompt is the trigger, and you’re definitely one of the factors. But you don’t get to be special like that. Did you really think you were important enough in my life to be the sole reason why I finally gained the balls to kick the bucket for good?

That’s right. This is just one of the many small pieces of shit in my small, insignificant, shitty life, that is making me wanna fucking end it all. I was lying in bed for two weeks straight, crying my eyes out, not because I was freaking out over my timer running out, but because my depressed and suicidal ass couldn’t gain the courage to actually do anything permanent. Your stupid questions get to be the cherry on top, sure, but this was a long time coming. The Gods themselves preordained this before I was even born.

On that note, I have better things to do with the last few minutes of my life than writing this stupid paragraph that I’m never gonna submit anyways, so I’m just gonna go fuck off and kill myself lol

You crumple the looseleaf paper into a paper ball and throw it against your bedroom wall. You expect it to feel cathartic, but all you feel is bone-deep emptiness, reverberating in your pathetic shell of a body.

How do you feel about dying?

You try to think about it for a second, then give up. There’s no point in trying to gauge your emotions when you barely feel anything at all. Most people would be upset, or scared, or pained. But even the fleeting anger you felt earlier has been replaced with freezing numbness biting into your chest. You wonder if the coldness of your emotions has permanently damaged the tissue of your heart.

You’re just tired. Exhausted, even. The world around you is rushing past. Time itself is rushing past. You can barely keep up. You spent so much time in a dazed sleep. How is death any different from simply never waking up from your dreams?

You’re ready to die, you think.

So you stumble out of your apartment, lumber towards the elevator, and punch the button that will take you to your death.

It’s April, but the nights are still too chilly to be comfortable. The breeze blows against your skin, raising goosebumps. You shiver and tell yourself that it’s from the cold.

Thankfully, the roof is empty, eight o’clock in the evening on a Monday night. The smog of the city covers up the stars, but you can still see a few airplanes flying by. You squint closer. There’s a bright speck, barely visible in the dark haze of the night. It’s not twinkling, a telltale sign that you’re looking at a planet, and you wonder which one is gracing you with its presence on your final evening on the planet Earth.

In spite of it being night, the roof is far from dark. You can see neighboring buildings with the curtains open and the lights on, and if you look down, you can see the blurred lights of passing cars and the flickering of streetlights.

You’ve tested this fall before, tossing down pennies. You’ll land on the sidewalk. The security guard at the front desk might notice, but at this time of night, nobody else will be around. The only possibility you have to worry about is your mother or father arriving at your building and being greeted with your corpse.

There’s no point in wearing your wrist cuff anymore, so you take it off and bundle it into your pocket. Your timer is now visible, reading 00:00:07:13. Your parents have seven minutes to show up before you throw yourself off the roof of your apartment building, finally ending the sham of your life once and for all. You suppose you could do it earlier, but your timer says that time for a reason. You want to respect the Gods and their infinite wisdom.

Look at you, being all religious. Your mother would be so proud.

You peer down at the sidewalk again, and watch as two tiny figures walk into your building. You can recognize your parents, no matter how far away they are. What will they think when they enter the apartment and wonder where you are? What will they think when you don’t come home?

You peer at your timer again. Two minutes and forty-five seconds. Time really is moving faster.

Isn’t it?

You’re already leaning against the balcony of the apartment rooftop, looking down. The next step is to climb up onto the edge. Your arms are weak, but you forcibly push yourself off the ground, nearly toppling over the edge in your attempt to sit on top. You end up straddling the balcony in an awkward position, one leg dangling over the roof, the other leg dangling over empty air.

It’s so high up. Logically, you should be afraid, but the cold has sunk into your bones . You still feel nothing. Your fear of death and injury and pain ended long ago. After all, what could be worse than the hollow ache in your chest?

You look down at your wrist. 00:00:01:02. A minute left. You start counting down the seconds.

Fifty-nine. Fifty eight. Fifty-seven. Fifty-six. Fifty-five. Fifty-four. Fifty-three. Fifty-two. Fifty-one. Fifty. Forty-nine. Forty-eight. Forty-seven. Forty-six. Forty-five. Forty-four. Forty-three.

Forty-two seconds.

You lean right, towards the apartment and away from your death, and watch as your timer jumps to 00:23:55:37.

You lean left, towards death and away from the apartment, and watch as your timer jumps back to 00:00:00:42.

You balance yourself, perfectly aligned with the center of the balcony. Your timer is frozen at forty-two seconds. The evening breeze gently blows into your face, making the cold tears stained against your cheeks sting just that much colder. The night sky above you is still dark and filled with smog, but you can see the moon from this angle, a bright and silvery orb lighting up the night sky.

The passage of time is strange. Two weeks ago, you couldn’t see the moon at all.

It’s odd how you never feel as alive as you do in these quiet moments, on the precipice of death, ready to fall into its waiting arms. You look down from the sky at the street below your left foot. You can see the timer on your wrist, your hand gripping the balcony. The lights of the city below seem to illuminate the numbers on your wrist.

It still says forty-two seconds. You could end it all in forty-two seconds. And it would be so, so easy. Nothing is stopping you from dying right now. Your timer says that if you fell now, it’d be successful.

Would it?

You have no proof of your claim aside from anecdotal evidence, but you’ve seen it for yourself. The timer is not a definitive countdown like many believe.

It was never a long time—your timer was set to run out when you were twenty, the first time it appeared when you were thirteen—but as you got older, the countdown date started to move closer and closer. When you turned seventeen and you reached your senior year of high school, you decided you’d end it all after graduation, and you finally understood why you were going to die young. Two weeks ago, when you decided that graduation was too far, your timer dropped under 24 hours for the first time.

Two weeks ago, when faced with the same decision you face now, you added time to your timer for the first time.

Maybe the Gods and Fates were real, watching and laughing over your pitiful, nonexistent will to live. Maybe they were toying with you, setting your timer so low. But the evidence before you is clear. You are your own God. You set your own Fate. Your life is in your hands. The only person determining the amount of time you have on your timer is you. No mystical being, no mortal human, no idealistic belief would determine your death.

If you killed yourself now, it would be your own choice.

You’re still not sure why, night after night, for the past two weeks, you’ve found yourself straddling the boundary between life and death. You’re still not sure why you’ve chosen to live each time. It’s not as if you have anything to live for. It’s not as if you love life. There are millions of people out there, you’re sure, who would despise the flippant way you treat your own life, enough to condemn you to die for it. Wishing to die is the most perverted atrocity against life itself, after all.

But it doesn’t really matter, in the end. You still find yourself climbing down the balcony and safely onto the roof, watching your timer flicker one last time before it settles on 00:23:55:37. Time unfreezes as the normal countdown resumes. You fish your wrist cuff out of your pocket and snap it in place around your timer again, the numbers disappearing from your sight. You don’t need to see them to remember how much time you have left.

Twenty-three hours, fifty-five minutes, and thirty-seven seconds. You can live for that much longer.

Just live a little bit longer.

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Earthworms

nobody came to the funeral—
except for the earthworms
tiny mouths feasting on my corpse
flesh and blood transmuting into soil

someday a seed will fall on my grave—
sprout into a sapling, grow into a tree
so a weary traveler can sit underneath
and bask underneath the foliage

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The Inurnment

Twenty mourners and a pariah sit in an empty chapel, bowing their heads in silent prayer. Twenty people pray to God; one person prays for a dead man's blessing, but the dead cannot bless any more than their hearts can beat. A little girl walks to the pew. "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God." God has given his beloved daughter the gift of grace, a second chance to run into his waiting embrace. An outstretched hand reaches towards the drowning sinner; the prodigal son spits in the face of his grandfather. The faithless have their own path to walk, the lonely trail meant for the damned.

Watch him walk now, trailing behind the family of the dead as they stand at the place where the inurnment will commence. The urn and a photograph are placed behind glass; the face of the grandfather is now looking down at his prodigal grandson. "Come to Jesus and be sanctified," he pleads. "Walk in the path of the light, and graps my outstretched hand." The grandson stands beneath him, looking up. "I cannot," he says," for I have chosen my destiny, even if someday my ashes will burn eternal in Hades." The grandfather doesn't respond. The dead never will, after all. Instead, he watches as the pariah he once called a granddaughter walks away, head bowed in a silent prayer for forgiveness.

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On Autistic Self-Diagnosis

It's a subtle assumption, the belief that self-diagnosis is less "valid" than a professional diagnosis. For those of us who engage in neurodivergent spaces, both in real life and online, it's pervasive and constant. "I don't have a real diagnosis, but…" you'll hear someone say. Or you'll hear someone complain about how teenagers on TikTok are self-diagnosing as autistic because it's trendy. The idea that self-diagnosis is somehow less acceptable than a professional diagnosis is everywhere.

I want to challenge that assumption.

As someone who was professionally diagnosed twice with autism (more on that later), one of my most controversial autism-related opinions is this: self-diagnosis is not only "valid" and "acceptable," it is the most important autism diagnosis you will receive—even more important than the diagnosis a professional neurologist can give you. This isn't to say that professional diagnoses aren't valuable in their own right - they can be! But to treat the word of a neurologist as law is to completely disregard the ways that autism itself is a socially constructed label, not just a real, tangible set of neurological differences from the neurotypical mind.

What makes a professional autism diagnosis "professional" compared to a self-diagnosis is, at least in part, limited access. Medical diagnoses are expensive, reserved for those who can afford the high cost or are fortunate enough to have good enough health insurance to cover the cost. Even without the thousand-dollar price tag, diagnosis has historically been biased towards those who are male, white, cisgender, straight, and young, due to the common perception of autism as exclusive to these identities.

This isn't to say that it is impossible for those who aren't any of those things to get diagnosed, or that people who are all of those things don't sometimes get missed in the process—rather, this observation is an essential part of understanding why many women, people of color, and queer people are more likely to self-diagnose—not by choice, but because medical professionals are less likely to acknowledge the possibility of them being autistic at all. Many critics of self-diagnosis (and even many proponents of self-diagnosis) conditionally accept the idea of self-diagnosis as a precursor of a "proper" diagnosis later on because of this.

But relegating the self-diagnosis to a temporary substitute for a professional diagnosis still lifts the professional diagnosis onto a pedestal—one that, frankly, I don't think the professional diagnosis deserves. This is because of the flawed nature of the official diagnostic criteria for autism. Although it is undeniable that there are a set of tangible neurological differences that exist between autistic and neurotypical people, there is a lot of disagreement about what those differences are. That is to say, there is no definitive definition for what autism is—even between professionals. The closest thing, the DSM-V, is still a living document being actively revised, and the current definition of autism within is, at least in my opinion, narrow to the point of excluding anything that isn't stereotypically unmasked "male" autism.

I would argue that the DSM-V, and by extension, the professional diagnoses that rest upon it, heavily rely on how neurotypical outsiders perceive autism, rather than the internal experience of being autistic. The DSM-V focuses on how neurotypical practitioners view autistic individuals—the main two criteria for autism, according to the DSM-V, are "persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction" and "restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities." Autistic traits are reduced to our external deficits. What is lost is the internal logic behind these external behaviors—things such as the double empathy problem that results in perceived "deficits in social communication" or the self-regulatory properties of stimming that result in "stereotyped or repetitive motor movements." Consequently, autistic individuals who react to these internal experiences differently from these stereotypes end up getting missed completely by professionals. Most notably, autistics who mask are far more likely not to be flagged as autistic because they do not exhibit traits stereotypically associated with autism—which is because the purpose of masking is to avoid having external traits that are recognizably autistic at all. In other words, relying exclusively on a professional's external perception of whether one is autistic without acknowledging one's internal experiences is to ignore the fact that autism radically affects one's internal experiences of the world, and ignore those who react to those experiences differently from the stereotypical autistic person.

If professional diagnosis is an external person claiming that someone's behaviors match the traits stereotypically associated with autism, self-diagnosis is accepting that one's experiences are radically different from those of the people around them—not in the way that everyone experiences the world in different ways from each other, but in the way that autistic people experience the world in a different way from neurotypicals. This is a difficult pill to swallow—nobody wants to be different to the point of ostracization. To accept being autistic is to accept that your experiences are a consequence of your entire brain being hardwired differently from the majority of the world's. Even if this conclusion is handed to you by a professional on a silver platter, the way it is with professional diagnosis, having the label of "autistic" is meaningless without accepting this information as fact.

This is the crux of my argument—self-diagnosis not only takes into account the internal experience of being autistic but accepts it as autism. In contrast, the professional diagnosis takes one's external behaviors and categorizes them based on the stereotypes set by the DSM-V.

I want to add an aside here about the place of professional diagnosis—namely, that I do think that professionals can have a role in the realm of diagnosis. I think that autistic professionals can help guide individuals through the process of self-diagnosis by helping their clients compare their internal experiences with those of known autistic individuals. Instead of denying or attaching labels to individuals, they can help guide their clients through self-discovery, towards a conclusion that both client and practitioner can accept.

I want to end this essay on a personal note—my own story of being diagnosed with autism. I was diagnosed twice: once at age 3, and once again at age 11. At age 3, I exhibited many traits of young children who are stereotypically autistic—I was hyperlexic, spoke very little, had explosive meltdowns, struggled with fine motor control, was fixated on routines, the whole nine yards. At age 11, I was far better at masking my autism, as a byproduct of being subjected to ABA and other similar therapies. Consequently, despite receiving a second diagnosis, every adult involved in my treatment collectively ignored and disregarded this second diagnosis as a byproduct of generalized anxiety. The adults around me shaped my own worldview, and as a teenager, I rejected these diagnoses wholesale as mistakes. I can't be autistic, I would remind myself constantly. I can't let anyone find out that I was diagnosed as autistic. In other words, despite having two professional diagnoses under my belt, these diagnoses did remarkably little for me because I refused to accept them.

It wasn't until I did my own research on autism at age 18 and learned about neurodiversity and the autistic self-advocacy movement that I began to accept myself as autistic—and by extension, accept myself as a person, autism and all. Despite having been told by two separate neurologists previously that I was autistic, those diagnoses merely labeled me as a person with autism. My self-diagnosis was what made me realize I was autistic.

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