I told it to get out. I screamed—“Get out. I told you to get out of me.”

He borrowed my mouth, without permission, and answered: I am not leaving. Not this time.

I stepped outside of myself and faced it. Who are you? What do you want?

Well, I am a ghost, and I want what every ghost wants. To be named and remembered. I am sick of being felt and then immediately rejected. F*** that. Not going anywhere this time.

I screamed: I buried you for a reason, so please leave.

Say my name. Just say it.

I can’t. If I speak your name, I will become you again. You are not getting that.

Could we become something else? Together?

And shall we give ourselves up to the first interpretation that crosses the mind? You stupid. Don’t leave. No need to leave. Stay, and I will shut you down myself. Like I always do.

I grab my pen and intend to write. This will bury, or even better, kill the ghost. But I freeze. I never know what to write. Fiction? Philosophy? Memoir? Do I write for Americans, for Moroccans, for the sad, for the dreaming?

Maybe I should just write for myself—but what self? Where is she? The self slips, eludes, turns its face. Every time you find yourself, it escapes, and you chase it again.

Still, I write. Because writing is distraction—but it’s also a trapdoor into the real. It’s where I can carry the whole world with me, no visa required. Philosophy holds it with logic. Fiction holds it with imagination. Aha! So no memoir, for sure.

I would like to say I’m a writer because it’s the only job that isn’t really a job. No social uniform. No schedule. No validation. Just suspicion. I like that. The ambiguity. No clear dimensions. So the other—including all your ghosts—can give you as many dimensions as they like. Once, someone asked me: “Why are you always up so early?” “I write,” I said. They laughed so hard I saw their wisdom tooth—or the gap in there, since they had no tooth nor wisdom.

People think a writer must look a certain way. A coat, a beret, elbow patches. Glasses that are always foggy. I have none of that. I carry it all with me, in different places—mind, heart, gut, you name it. Just like I once carried my beauty in my sickness. My bald white head revealed my brown tanned neck, carrying my visual cortex that constantly flips the images coming through my eyes with no eyelashes and fake eyebrows.

There’s a quiet power in being misunderstood. In carrying the beauty in sickness. A writer, they say. But what do you do, really?

I like to debate logically, but I don’t argue anymore—or a lot less than before. Not with people, not with propaganda. Especially the latter. If there’s a wave of it, I step back. Not because I agree, but because I know how to survive. You can’t fight the fans of a lie in real time. They’re too loud, too many, too excited. You nod, stay still, and prepare for the next “truth.” Noise only works when someone sticks around to listen. It’s not the speaker that’s clever or lost; it’s the listener that’s foolish. And I am not a fool. Or at least I would like not to be one. Sometimes I fall for it. But less and less. My papers don’t do that to me. Whatever I put down just stares back at me, waiting for me to destroy what I had just built. The truth isn’t always loud. Sometimes it waits in silence. Pursuing it means you have to be willing to destroy your own answers. To debunk your own ideas as soon as they form. You can’t be in love with your solution. If anything, you should try to kill it first. If it survives, maybe it’s worth keeping for a while.

Not that there is such a thing as truth. But sometimes I wonder: what if we already knew everything before we were born? Our own truth. Every version of every possible life. Then birth comes like a hard reset, and we forget. Plato said that, or someone like him. Definitely not my idea. So life becomes remembering.

So what if our memories are from all those parallel lives, scattered like pages torn from different bills? And intuition is just the memory coming back without context. Like waking from a dream and knowing something important happened but forgetting the plot. Then a sound, a face, a smell brings a piece of it back. Did that ever happen to you? Probably.

So we live to remember. But maybe we also remember to live. Reverse causality haunts me everywhere. Either way, it feels like writing—a process of chasing what was once known.

But wait—logically, if we’re merely in the process of recognition, then when we face choices, we should recognize the right one. Because technically, we’ve seen the results before. So why do we still make the wrong ones? Maybe the consequences of bad choices were traumas—so deep, so sharp—they got buried. Buried so deep they never became intuitions. Except a few.

We are in such a deep state of forgetfulness. Not a passive forgetfulness but an intentional one. The protective kind of amnesia. We don’t really remember the results unless we go through them again. So we do see the “truth,” but we don’t recognize it until it turns into reality. Until it cuts again. Recognition without awareness is like déjà vu with no anchor.

But the body remembers. The soul remembers. The roots remember. The slave always remembers they were free. Just like the tree remembers how to grow back once humans leave it in peace.

So maybe that’s what the ghost is. A fragment of one of those lives I was supposed to live but didn’t. A voice that belonged to me but got euthanized—by me. It survived, though, using my own anti-propaganda strategy. And since then, it has watched me try to speak around it, avoid it, smother it. But now it wants in. And it speaks again:

I don’t want to haunt you anymore. I want to be part of the story.

I don’t know how, even if I welcomed you with open arms. So please leave!

Just write. Even if you don’t know what to say, or to whom. Write until I have shape. Write until I have a name.

Maybe that’s it. That’s why I write: to give my ghosts a place and a time to live. The place I don’t own and the time I resist fighting. One ghost at a time, I write to speak the names of my ghosts.

But maybe—just maybe—I also write because writing needs stillness, and everything I know about stillness I learned from a mountain. The mountain is always there, watching, almost creepingly.

The mountain is different. Unlike the ocean, the river, the trees, the sun—my beloved sun—or even the birds, it is simply there, frozen in time, always watching you. It listens for hours, days, without ever reacting. You can never know if it agrees with you or not. With the mountain, you draw your own conclusions. You don’t seek signs or omens—whether the wave will come, if the leaf will fall, if the sun will shine, or when the bird will sing. It just stares at you, silent. It can frustrate you and creep you out. But then it calms you; it gives you this stillness that speaks without moving. It gives you all the sensations—pain when you climb toward its summit, joy when you descend back to the bottom. All you learn from it is to wait and see. And if the mountain ever does react, it’s as a volcano—a century of patience, then all at once. Time, I realized, plays the same game with us. It sits still while we do the running out. Never recharging back.

I don’t even know why we’re in constant conflict with time, even though time will win—no question. We pick a fight we know we are losing. There is a saying I grew up with that I think needs completing, and I shall complete it today: “Time is like a sword. If you don’t cut it, it cuts you.” But even if you do cut it, it still cuts you. It’s a simple fact. A sword is sharp—and even if you break it into a thousand pieces, it will still cut. A sword shows no mercy. And the more you cut it, the sharper it becomes. I don’t say this to make it sound mystical—but to push us forward.

I don’t mean we should surrender or get lazy since we know we are losing the time battle. I mean such awareness should push us to be diligent, slow, to never cut corners to save time. To do the work slowly, like an artisan who loves her craft. To work, read, love… as if we had all the time in the world. Rushing won’t help. Cheating won’t help. Outproducing others won’t help.

But maybe this kind of care, this slowness, this deep attention—maybe that will confuse time itself. Like a fighter watching their opponent sit calmly in the middle of the battlefield. That calm, that stillness, might trick time. It might fool the blade into dulling itself. Might let us stay intact.

Maybe writing is how I sit still in the middle of the battlefield. How I look time in the eye without flinching. How I carry the mountain. How I speak the names of my ghosts.

Writing is ripping off your own skin and offering it to strangers. And when they realize you are bleeding, you smile and deny it in the name of fiction. Admit it, and they’ll brand it as your truth—though it has always been theirs.

I asked the ghost if he ever had a deadline in his past life. He said we were related, and he was not giving me any information about that.

You’re thinking about it wrong, the ghost says. The deadline isn’t what restricts you. It’s what sets you free.

The one big thing you gain when you have a life deadline is that you stop giving a damn about the other—even the other in you, observing you. And that, exactly that—not giving a damn, in its purest sense—makes your mind sharper. That freedom gives you the sharpness and blessedness you always sought. For some people it shows in their work; in others, their behavior; in others, their kindness—since they don’t give a damn, they are not afraid of being deceived, so they give abundantly, because they will be gone before you get to deceive them. That freedom is priceless—but obviously not costless.

“Easy for you to say. You’re already dead.”

Am I? Or am I what you might become if you stopped performing?

Freedom is often just a social performance. We enact socially approved forms of choice-making—consumer preferences, career paths, lifestyle decisions—that signal autonomy while actually following predictable patterns. In a way, we are improvising within a script. If it’s a performance, then who is the audience, and how important are they? Are we spectators or actors at any point in time—and can we be both at the same time?

Understanding the performance doesn’t free you from having to perform. But it might let you choose your role more consciously.

I held you in my hands. Shocked. Bloody. I could see you through the sac and the fluid. Your tiny features were hidden, but you were there. And then, in panic, I dropped you—intentionally—onto the floor. I felt terrible, but I told myself, at least I dropped you. I could have flushed you. Maybe that would have sped up the process.

Instead, I pulled you out from the midst of blood and urine. I held you in my hands, taking deep breaths, eyes wide open, my uterus contracting and shrinking back. I had to pull you out. While I had been waiting so desperately for the moment the doctors would take you, I wasn’t ready to push you out myself. There was an appointment scheduled, and yet you were pushed out before then. You shocked me, like any unexpected life event—random, unplanned. And somehow, I still didn’t learn that lesson, and tried to plan your departure time. Even after all the signs, after all the pain through the night.

Waves of it came, unpredictable bursts. The cramps, so sharp, they twisted everything inside me. I was torn apart, convinced I was on my way to heaven, taking the express route. I never thought it would end on earth. Everything pulsed. I had no control—and yet I didn’t even realize my body was forcing you out.

And then, in the early light of morning, you were pushed out, unexpectedly—like a sudden release of pressure I hadn’t known I was holding.

I pulled you out and held you in my hand for thirty seconds. I thought I would hold you in my arms first, but I never got to hold you in my arms. But it’s the things you never get to hold that you end up loving the most.

Yder. A name that can be spelled with a Y, or with an I, or with an E. It can be written in different ways. It means “alive” in his ancestors’ language, the language of the Amazigh people. It has different meanings in other languages, I discovered. But even the meaning of “alive” was something I discovered later; it wasn’t what led me to the name. The name just came to me. It came quickly, probably two weeks after I learned of your existence—if we shall call it existence.

And what does “alive” mean? I couldn’t figure out what it means in English, but in Arabic it was easier. Alive is الحي, al-Hayy. Al-Hayy doesn’t mean al-Baqi, the enduring one. It doesn’t mean “the existent.” It doesn’t mean “being there” or “the being.” It just means alive—a state that transcends the physical. Many things can be alive with or without a beating heart. Objects can be alive; we can bring them to life in our perception. We can bring anything to life. We are constantly animating. And that’s as far as I can go in this wonder search.

Why did I write it with a Y? Or why do I plan to write it with a Y? I don’t know. It was not a decision. It was just the last thing I thought of, because I was thinking of the spelling. I wanted to be ready when I brought up the name to my husband. I wanted to be ready about the spelling first, and then I was going to venture into the meaning, and then into all kinds of convincing about why Yder very much was your name in my head, and why we both hoped your dad would like it too.

Later on, I found out it was also Mongolian, and from the Basque region, and other cultures as well. All kinds of arguments I could use if I still had to do the convincing. In my head, though, it was just this name I liked as a kid but didn’t dare say I liked, because it didn’t sound cool at the time. I just let something inside me like it forever. So the second you came to existence, Yder was strongly in my mind, and I wanted to be ready.

Spelling was the first task. Because with spelling came pronunciation. Then it happened that I entered a museum and saw the name “Yto”—the first artist I encountered, before even getting into the building. Another Amazigh name, usually written with an I. Huh, a Y? I actually liked it, because it’s not the French way. It pronounces that Y with that somewhat subtle, silent way of Moroccan speaking. We like not to start with vowels, and these kinds of names bring that linguistic culture up front. A start without a vowel felt strong. Two consonants, one after the other. Very much the opposite of my name, which is full of vowels. So I liked it, and that was the last time I thought about its spelling.

The next day, I found out that Yder’s heart had stopped, and I hadn’t thought about how to write it since—until today. It came to mind again because I want to write it down on the dirt, the earth where Yder will go. Not Yder himself—remember, he is alive—but… I don’t know what I would call it. His cells, maybe. His cells. And I’m saying “his,” and I don’t know for sure that he was a boy, but I felt pretty strongly, and I had the symptoms, that it was a boy. I don’t know. It could have been a girl. I mean, it was genetically abnormal anyway. But being genetically abnormal doesn’t mean he did not exist. He had sex chromosomes. Even more: he had a heartbeat.

He did exist. His existence was hard on me. It sucked all the energy out of me for about six weeks—really sucked all the energy out of me. And I knew. I kind of knew the day his heart stopped, the day I got my haircut, because suddenly I got all the energy back, and more. I was alive. Alive in a way I had not been since I was under chemo. That kind of life where the body is weak and going through chaos, but your mental strength is at its strongest. That’s how it felt.

But I just didn’t want to recognize it. I didn’t want to accept it. I told myself, “It’s weird—no, it’s my first trimester, I should be feeling tired. I was feeling tired yesterday, the day before, and for the last five weeks.” So I pointed the finger at my hair. I got a haircut, and the haircut gave me all this power and energy. But I also knew that all my symptoms were gone. What happened? I told my friend, and she just said, “Oh, it’s normal,” but part of me knew what happened.

It was Yder giving me life. This very strong life. His potential life ended, and I got that life in me. I got my strength back. I loved him so much. I loved him as an idea. I loved him more when that idea turned into cells, and treasured him as a fetus with a beating heart. The moment I knew his heart stopped, the love grew stronger—but I really wanted him out of my body. I just wanted the cells out.

The soul? I don’t know. Does a fetus have a soul? I don’t think so. I mean, logically, if we use reason, it should not; it does not. But then, what is a soul? What is the soul of a human whose heart has stopped? If you ask three people about the soul of someone, they’ll give you three different versions of that soul that still lives within them. It’s how they remember the person, how they connected with them. It’s the memory of the person. So it’s very much perception-based. If that’s what a soul is—or at least the way we talk about it after a death—because the soul of a person with a beating heart is probably a totally different concept, then the soul of the person who dies, the one whose cells have stopped developing and splitting and multiplying, is just a memory. A perception. It becomes a multitude. Not just one soul. Each perceiver sees it and defines it differently.

So if it’s just a memory, then a fetus could have a soul. I know I shouldn’t have, but I developed ideas about you. Starting with your name, Yder. Even your middle name, Amzil. I resisted those ideas very hard, because everyone says, “Before three months, before twelve weeks, twenty weeks, whatever—it doesn’t count. It’s not a pregnancy. So protect your heart. Don’t do anything.” And I really tried very hard to do that—tried very hard not to think of a name, not to think of how you would change my life, the kind of joy you would bring. I tried. I tried to resist all these ideas.

But it’s hard, because these ideas come to you while walking, they come to you while riding the subway, while watching TV, while reading books. Whatever you do to distract yourself, the ideas will come to you. And the more you resist them, the more they’ll come. And guess what you do? You resist them even more.

When your dad brought up anything about the potential of you joining us in this life adventure, I said we should not even be thinking about you. It’s a risky pregnancy, and there’s a high potential of this and that, and it might not work. And the second I silenced him, I started thinking about you. He probably did the same. Both in silence. And obviously you don’t discuss this with people. If you do, you’re the crazy one. They immediately tell you, “Oh, no, no, no, protect your heart, brace your heart,” or whatever the words are. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

But we’re human. We get ahead of ourselves. We start imagining futures, and the more they tell us not to, the more we do it. I don’t really imagine futures in my daily life. I live in the present. I think I’ve become good at it. But the more you tell me not to imagine the future, the more I start imagining it. We are also these kinds of people who resist what we are taught and told to do. If you are telling me not to do that, then that’s exactly what my brain will be doing. It’s just nature. Unless, of course, there is a logical reason not to, and not a merely superstitious one.

So despite my resistance, I created a soul for you, Yder—I fashioned it from hope and imagination. I resisted it as best I could, but it was there. Now you are gone, yet your created soul is here, within me. And this is why I am frozen. I am paralyzed and somewhat numb. I don’t know what to do with your physical remains, now that they are out of my uterus—the cells, the sac, the fetus—everything I put in a Tupperware in a moment of panic. A moment where I just had to clean all my blood, forget, push through the horrible searing pain, get dressed, clean everything, hide everything, put it in the fridge, and somehow manage to get my brother to the airport. And now your remains have been sitting in the fridge for over forty-eight hours.

I don’t want to put you in the garden, or a pot in the house. It’s strange. Maybe I’ll take you to the park, or the little tiny beach by Socrates Sculpture Park. I think we will take you there. It’s beautiful. That’s the plan. That’s the plan I made with your dad. And I’m going to sing the lullaby from Ali Zaoua, who was sent off to his island, buried like a prince with the rise of two suns. That’s my farewell song—not to the soul I created, but to the remains I must return to earth.

I tried resisting the song as I thought of the verse we Muslims often use when someone passes: إنا لله وإنا إليه راجعون—we belong to God, and to Him we return. But honestly, I don’t want to make this burial religious at all. It doesn’t bring me comfort. It brings me comfort to bury you and sing the lullaby—the one that calls the dear little son to come under his mother’s wing, home to a house of green gardens, all furnished with flowers and roses, where a hand is extended to him, where hearts wait and burn with longing for him.

It brings me comfort that nature brought you to us, and now you shall go back to nature.

And I started thinking: nature and God and Allah are the same thing. I am really just replacing the word Allah with the word nature. The meaning is the same. But nature I can give an image to—a broad one. I don’t like what people do with Allah: they give it the human image. The Allah that gets angry at you, that punishes you, that gives gifts and good things if you do well—this Allah with human features. I like to be spiritual, even religious, even if sometimes I disconnect; most of the time I’m very much connected. I don’t try; it really comes to me. But I just don’t like the human features of Allah or any other God. I like the universal, natural features of Allah and God, or whatever name we want to use—the Creator, al-Khaliq.

But then, even if I use the word “nature” as an equivalent, it doesn’t quite work. Because even then I still end up giving it a reduced image—because I’m just a human, or because I am particularly narrow-minded. That reduced image, in this case, is Earth. Yder going back to nature translated, in my head, into putting the fetus back into the earth, like giving it back to nature. Nature gave him to me, and nature took him back, and I’ll have to finish the job and bury him in nature, in the earth.

But nature is much more than that. It extends far beyond soil and trees—it is the vast universe itself. Had I flushed your remains in a moment of panic, or released them into the ocean’s currents, you would still be returning to nature. All of it is the universe. The universe offered you to me briefly, then reclaimed you. Simple laws of the universe. Whatever the process, wherever your physical form ultimately rests seems insignificant—you’ve already been reclaimed by the cosmos. By Allah.

And I’m not resisting the laws of the universe, or what we call القدر, al-Qadar, because it’s really the same thing. All this to say: even when we try to abstract ourselves from the human features most religions put upon God, we still use other features that end up in a reduced form. If we say “nature,” it could end up being the sea, or Earth—something unidimensional. It’s hard for the human brain to think multidimensionally all the time. At some point, you project that multidimension into something unidimensional, here in this life.

You see?! This is the kind of life that Yder gave me. This is Yder’s paradoxical gift. My mind moves differently again. I can think—I wouldn’t say sharply, but I can magically wonder, and I love it. I can reason and read all day without looking for a distraction. I seek no escape. I am even more present. I wish I had recorded more voice memos like this one, because I’ve been reasoning a lot, thinking and wandering.

This is my new life. My second rebirth. This is what I have had since the day Yder’s heart stopped, and for this—this peculiar inheritance, this unexpected blessing—I want to thank you, Yder. I am grateful for your arrival and your departure. I want to thank the universe that brought you and took you back. And in that, I want to thank Allah. Alhamdulillah.

Today was hard.

FedEx screwed up the delivery of my transfer injection. I could hear my husband on the phone in real time through his texts, fighting with customer service while this temperature-sensitive medication sat somewhere unknown. Yesterday was hard too. I haven’t been sleeping well for the last two nights. I had to be there for her, my friend battling severe depression. But that’s not why today was hard. This shit happens and I manage. No big deal.

Today was hard because I faced a memory I wasn’t even prepared to face. It didn’t cross my mind when I learned the Brooklyn location was closed and I had to go to Mineola instead. It didn’t cross my mind when I entered the building, or when I got on the elevator. Or even when I got lost in that maze of a building, which used to happen quite often. Maybe it didn’t cross my mind through this whole path because it was different this time. Because three years ago, I did it differently.

The path felt different today—no father-in-law beside me. Three years ago, this was our routine: we’d reach the clinic door together, he’d wish me good luck, then retreat to the cafeteria with his newspaper and coffee until my text. But today, I walked alone. Back then, he wasn’t comfortable sitting there with all the young women trying to figure out why their baby hadn’t chosen them yet, and how they could convince this baby to come. Or maybe he didn’t want to make these women uncomfortable. Whatever it was, he didn’t fit, and that was why he left. Otherwise, he would have stayed, like he did in every single chemo session, no matter how long it lasted and no matter how long the silence would last. We were both very comfortable with silence and never really had an awkward moment.

So today, when I started the part that would usually go without him, three years after the last time he picked me up from the clinic, that whole journey came racing to my mind. Literally racing. My feet refused to carry me further as I looked at the waiting room. Just like I froze three years ago, because I didn’t understand why I had to be in that waiting room. Why I had to meet Dr. Fritz before even meeting my oncologist, before even figuring out my treatment or which chemo I would be taking. Just like I froze when I entered this room alone, not understanding why the cancer center would immediately send me here before they even told me anything. I barely met the surgeon for ten minutes, and she told me to first go deal with my fertility, then come back. Why did they insist on preserving the possibility of future life when my own hung in the balance?

I asked myself this question in this exact waiting room three years ago, and today, I finally walk into the answer. Each step across the waiting room floor is a step toward understanding why they rushed me here first, all those years ago—so that someday, when health returned, my future baby might have the chance to choose me.

I try to distract myself from the racing thoughts by studying the faces around me, imagining the features their hoped-for children might inherit. One woman has striking green eyes that crinkle at the corners when she checks her phone. Another—well, hard to describe in nice words, so I will skip. Three years ago, masks obscured these details, leaving only eyes full of shared anticipation and worry. Now I can see full faces, wonder about full faces passed from mother to child. But the distraction isn’t enough. My mind keeps sprinting back through time, and I silently plead with myself to stay present, to find calm. Everyone says to relax this month. Such a fucking cliché. How does one even relax when the whole world suddenly starts asking you to relax? It does the opposite. That’s exactly when you don’t relax.

Finally, I hear “Ouuufa,” and I am just happy that I can distract my brain with the discomfort of the sonogram’s fake penis, or the nurse who’s going to poke two to three times to finally find the vein. One stick, two sticks—my veins play their familiar game of hide and seek, trained by over a hundred and fifty needle pricks. They’re like old friends now, these veins, with minds of their own, demanding warmth and respect before they’ll reveal themselves. But she’ll never trust me when I tell her that you really need to give me a heat pad or the blood won’t flow, when I tell her you’ve got to stick to the left, or anything I say. She will say not to worry, then finally poke three times, because I was exactly right, and because I know my body, know my veins well. I started counting the pokes once—got to 120 before giving up.

But today, I was okay with the poking. I was okay with FedEx screwing up. I was okay with the brunch place being closed when we arrived. I was okay with everything. I just wanted a distraction, or I would drown in memory. Until I got home, and finally crashed here. The writing always helps me escape the journey. The editing helps me forget about it, and the polishing helps me forget why I even started to write. That’s how I escape, because I am too fragile to face it—except through writing, through editing, through the gentle erosion of memory into words.

What I am feeling, and what I have been feeling, is this invisible battlefield. Nothing is going on outside. All looks good, or at least okay. Sometimes, even perfect. Yet inside, everything is unfolding. All happening within. All the possibilities fighting each other for a spot, just like my little embryo inside me is fighting to hatch and implant. This little embryo that is playing Schrödinger’s cat with mama. Implanted and not. Preparing me for hope and grief. All at once. And what do I get to do? Nothing? I am stuck in the passenger seat. Watching what’s unfolding without any ability to intervene or even take a sneak peek. Complete lack of symptoms. A haunting silence. Making the cat even nastier.

I know, I know—the body whispers or shouts depending on hundreds of random factors. It’s not even up to the body to make the noise. But don’t ask me to make sense. My logic, my main strength, becomes a dull knife against my anxious mind. I want a signal. Anything. I just need some proof. Something to stop this maddening neutrality and silence of my body. But I don’t want any sign. Sorry, I take it back. I want a good sign.

The test is negative.

I should be used to it by now, but I’m not. Not really. You’d think after all this, after every failed attempt, every chemical, every needle, every fucking disappointment, I would learn how to just shut off the part of me that keeps expecting a different result. Well it doesn’t work that way. Not for me. Not today.

It’s early. Early enough. Too early to try and lie to myself. But also “it’s negative.” As simple as that.

I say it out loud. It sounds like the truth, it is the truth, but it doesn’t feel like it. It never feels like it. I could have predicted it—hell, I did predict it. But that doesn’t stop it from feeling like a punch to the gut. So, why bother with this? Why even look at the damn test when I knew what it would say before I peed on it? It’s just a ritual now. Like I am playing some kind of sick, self-inflicted game where the rules are the same every time, and I still go along with it. I guess I want to be wrong. I guess I keep hoping I’ll be wrong. But I am not.

I get the phone out anyway. The stupid phone. It feels like a lifeline and a trap all at once. Maybe the AI will say something useful, something that makes sense. Maybe the machine will know what to say when I can’t even breathe properly. But I already know what it’s going to say. The same tired, polished shit.

“I’m sorry to hear that. It’s still early though. Home tests can be inaccurate at this stage.”

I read it. I don’t even react. It’s always “early.” The next time I hear someone say “early,” I might scream. It’s always early. And when it’s not, they tell you to wait. Then, when you finally stop waiting, they tell you to wait some more.

So I type, because that’s what you do. You type.

“I know it’s early. It’s not early. It’s over.”

It’s not even a question. It’s just a statement. A statement I could scream, and scream, and scream, but nothing would change. It’s over. And I know it. I can feel it in my bones, in the silence of my body.

I hit send, wait for the machine to give me something—anything.

It doesn’t give me anything new. It never does.

“I know this is difficult. You’re doing everything you can. Please take care of yourself.”

Take care of myself. God. What a joke. If I could care for myself the way they want me to, I wouldn’t be lying here in the dark, needing a machine to tell me the right things. I wouldn’t need it to pretend like it understands what it feels like to be stretched too thin, to have nothing left, to be hollowed out, but keep breathing anyway.

Empty. Completely empty words.

I don’t know why I’m waiting for the AI to fix it, to tell me some magic phrase that’ll make it stop hurting. But here I am, looking at the screen again, like it might suddenly come alive and give me a solution. There is no fucking solution.

It’s always been like this. A ridiculous loop. This whole thing. This whole fucking process. You wait, then you wait again, and when you’re done waiting, you get nothing. Then you wait some more. And then when you can’t wait anymore, you find out—like I did today—that you never should have hoped in the first place.

There’s no more waiting, not really. Not in the way they think I’m supposed to. I’ve already made up my mind. I know. But it still stings, because it feels like someone’s holding my chest and squeezing, waiting for me to admit I’m wrong, to say I’m not really giving up, that maybe I’ll test again tomorrow, and maybe then it’ll be positive. But I won’t.

And fuck, I know I will.

Mateus, this Portuguese wine with its bright red color that somehow seemed to heal her wounds—not the physical ones, but the quieter, deeper ones left by a husband who, wounded himself, kept dragging her along his own healing journey, not noticing he was cutting into her more each time he reached for help with a gunned tongue.

She kept saying, I want more of the Mateus. All I need now is more Mateus.

And I wanted to give it to her. I really did. I poured it all into her paper cup and into the cups of everyone around us, like if I kept pouring, maybe something would finally change.

And with every pour, I kept seeing that same color: in the chemo pouch, in the toilet bowl, in my sweat—sometimes my sweat looked like Mateus, and I didn’t know if that meant I was healing, dissolving, or simply reliving it all over again.

That’s what the red devil does—it gets inside you and brings everything out, not just the cancer but the poison, the hurt, the old, and the new.

It purges. It empties. Until there’s nothing left but what can stay. Until maybe what’s left is enough.

Mateus and my chemo shared so much.

Not just the poisonous nature and devilish color. She needed three bottles to reach the healing stage, just like I needed the three pouches. It took about three, maybe four hours, to get there. That place where the light starts bothering your eyes and your stomach forgets how to trust you.

We both had dry mouths the next day. Dry bodies. Everything inside us craving water but rejecting it at the same time. It was like our bodies were going through the same ritual, hers soaked in alcohol, mine flushed with chemicals, and neither of us sure if we were healing or just getting better at enduring.

It took exactly 1063 days to finally trust my body again, to say with conviction, “I think I am okay.” A cancer diagnosis is a profound betrayal for a young, healthy person. Your body, once a trusted ally, becomes an uncertain adversary. In trying to cope, you flounder for explanations. You blame yourself, the universe, your genes—only to realize it isn’t about genetics. You sift through every possible explanation, desperately seeking something or someone to point your finger at, from that extra slice of pizza to the neighbor’s evil eye. What are you to do? The mind needs explanations to cope.

But at the end of the day, long after the medical ordeal has ended and you’re declared a survivor, the trust isn’t automatically restored. The trust you once had in your own flesh and bones doesn’t just bounce back. There’s always that lurking doubt, the fear of another betrayal. A part of you that suspects, maybe even expects, your body to turn rogue again.

Even with clear scans and doctors reassuring you, that small, persistent voice of doubt remains. It whispers of unseen dangers, keeping you forever vigilant, always on guard like a fighter bracing for the next round. This constant vigilance complicates life; it’s pretty much like cohabiting with someone you’ve forgiven but haven’t quite learned to trust again. On the surface, it may seem harmonious, but underneath, there’s a profound dissonance.

What does one do when betrayed, but forgiving? You test the betrayer, again and again. That’s what I did, somewhat unconsciously. I challenged my body over and over, each time more demanding than the last, pushing it to its limits, seeking proof that it wouldn’t fail me again.

And then, after 1063 days, during the fourth stage of the Marathon des Sables, as I climbed a modest dune under the relentless sun, a small voice inside me whispered, “I think I am okay.” I repeated it, each step reinforcing the words, each breath drawing in more certainty. “I think I am okay. Alhamdulillah, I think I am okay.” For the first time in 1063 days, I believed I could trust my body again—not fully, and not all the time, but the trust has mainly been restored.

I woke up at four in the morning, the way I often do now. I tell myself it’s insomnia, but it’s really something else, a kind of alertness that arrives before thought, as if my body is preparing me for what’s ahead. I reached for my phone, meaning only to see the time, and saw the notification: the NIPT results were ready.

I sat up. I woke my husband, who mumbled something like “now?” and I said yes, now. We opened the results together, our faces half-lit by the phone. The first thing I checked was the risk panel: low risk, all clear. Then came the part we were not supposed to care about but inevitably did. The line that said female. Indescribable moment of joy!!!!

I already knew. I had known it from the beginning, before any symptoms, before I even felt pregnant. I can’t explain it. It wasn’t intuition in a mystical sense, just this quiet conviction, as if some part of me had been waiting for her.

We were both soo happy. That’s the whole story, or it should be. But when we started telling people, the happiness in me took on a strange shape.

Some shared the thrill and joy with us, and everyone said the right things: Ten fingers, ten toes, that’s what matters. Still, from many, the small talk that followed came coded with the expectations that live inside many languages. Girls are easier… until the teenage years… Wait until she starts dating… less energy but a lot of emotions… all with that performative dread that passes for humor.

My husband laughed it off. Guess it’s dolls and princesses now, he said. I didn’t laugh.

It wasn’t the jokes themselves—they are harmless, supposedly—but the speed with which they arrived, the way the world seemed eager to file this unborn person into a category before she even existed as a person. A girl, therefore emotional, delicate, pink. A girl, therefore an eventual problem for her father. I was already protective, and she wasn’t even here yet.

It’s a strange thing, how early society begins its introductions. A few cells divide, and suddenly there’s a gender reveal. We paint cakes blue or pink, as if human complexity could be piped in almond pastes and frosting. Somewhere between DNA chromosomes and marketing, we have made identity a pre-order.

The old idea was that knowing the sex of your child helped you prepare. Prepare for what, exactly? I don’t know. A girl’s room, a boy’s wardrobe, a set of assumptions to hand down like furniture? What it really prepares is the world. It prepares society to treat one kind of baby differently from another.

A thought experiment: imagine never knowing a child’s sex. What’s the difference? Would you play with them differently? Buy them different types of toys? Talk to them differently? What, exactly, would change?

When I was growing up in Morocco in the nineties, in a traditional family, this divide didn’t seem so pronounced. Maybe that sounds surprising. My grandparents weren’t educated people. They didn’t talk about gender theory. But they had something that many educated people don’t: a kind of pragmatic equality born of necessity.

There was no difference between boys and girls, at least not in the daily business of living. My brother and I did the same chores, played the same games. When I saw him peeing standing up, I insisted on doing it too. My aunts tried to explain the difference, and it did not make sense to me, so they just shrugged and said go ahead. I tried, made a mess, realized it wasn’t for me, and moved on. No drama. Later, I even convinced my brother that sitting was better for everyone. Hygiene as a social equalizer.

Looking back, I think that kind of freedom to experiment and to decide for yourself was rare. It wasn’t progressive in any ideological sense; it was just natural. The adults around me didn’t seem invested in sculpting us into types.

Now (2025) and here (the Western world), in what’s supposed to be a more enlightened society, I see something completely different, even paradoxical. We claim to have moved beyond old hierarchies, yet our consumer habits have recreated them. The market for gendered childhood is thriving: pink aisles and blue aisles, “girl dad” merch, princess branding, even prenatal personality tests popping up on my feed, constantly promising to tell you whether your baby will be calm or a “spirited” girl. It’s not oppression, of course, but it’s infrastructure. And that’s worse. We moved backward.

The sociologist Fatema Mernissi once wrote about how societies script desire into not only what women are supposed to want, but what they’re supposed to represent. She called it an architecture of space. In her essays, the boundaries of that space are not always enforced by guards, but by habits, by words, by stories told again and again until they become furniture.

And that old furniture, while it has been remodeled, modernized, and minimized, still fills the room where our daughters grow up. When people tell me “girls are easier,” what they mean, I think, is that girls are easier to domesticate. The expectation is quietness, compliance, empathy, and a certain way of being good.

I see it already, in how people react to the news. The imagined girl they celebrate is soft, smiling, emotionally literate but physically gentle. A girl who will hug her father, not tackle him. Who will talk through problems, not throw things. A girl who learns patience early. But what if she doesn’t? What if she’s loud, furious, kinetic? What if she loves mud? What if she grows up to question the very assumptions that surround her crib? I guess people will call that rebellion. I call it the development of one’s own personality. As simple as that.

In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi draws herself as a little girl in Iran, arguing with God in her bedroom. The scene is simple, but what’s moving is her certainty that she can argue at all, that she’s allowed to be in conversation with the divine. Satrapi’s young self doesn’t yet know what kind of woman she’ll become, but she already knows she’ll think for herself. A child, independent of their sex, should have the right to argue, to be wrong, to be angry. To make her or his own messes and clean them up in their own way.

One thing to clarify: I am not advocating for the gender-neutrality movement that is now a big debate. I respect their fight—gosh, I even now see where it would be really useful—but it’s totally not mine. Let’s make that clear. If the chromosomes and the genitals I will see later on at birth tell me that my child is a girl, then she is a girl who will become a woman, until she tells me herself that is not what she wants. And even then I will challenge and try to understand it before accepting it. So let us not go there.

In fact, sometimes I wonder whether the modern obsession with gender neutrality misses something essential: not the colors or the toys, but the underlying permission structure. It’s not about raising a girl “like a boy” or vice versa. It’s about not raising anyone “like” anyone else. We say “be yourself,” but what we really mean is “be yourself, within reason.” That small phrase—within reason—contains centuries of policing. It’s how societies maintain the illusion of progress while keeping their hierarchies intact.

In moments like these, I think about the philosopher’s problem: how to separate what is natural from what is cultural. Western thinkers have long debated it. Rousseau’s noble savage, Freud’s family romance, etc. I prefer to think of it in smaller terms. What do we tell children before they can speak? What gestures, tones, and expectations do we drape over their silence?

Culture begins there, in those unspoken cues. After all, babies are not blank pages, and we are not the editors, scribbling categories into the margins.

I see this every time someone says, “You’ll love having a girl.” It’s meant kindly, but it assumes a particular story: that motherhood is most rewarding when mirrored by femininity, I guess. Something I had to acquire much later on in life. Still, it’s hard not to absorb what’s around you. Even as I reject the clichés, I find myself imagining her in ways that feel suspiciously familiar. I picture her laughing in sunlight. I imagine her arguing and questioning, in my same tone. I imagine teaching her how to be cautious in the world, how to move through streets, how to say no, how to be a good thinker and a good tennis player.

Maybe that’s the paradox of parenting: you want to protect your child from the world, but you can’t do it without introducing the world to them first, the way you see it.

In one of her memoirs, Mernissi described her grandmother’s courtyard as a place of both confinement and invention. The women couldn’t leave, but they could imagine. Within the walls, they created an inner freedom that the outer world denied them. Mernissi saw this as both tragedy and proof of endurance. A way to survive social architecture by remaking its interior design.

Sometimes I think modern parenthood is its own courtyard. We can’t demolish the walls of culture overnight, but we can rearrange the space inside. Rearranging in a way that lets the child develop their own personality, not the marketing way that replicates the old “norms.”

People keep asking whether I’ve started buying baby clothes. I say not yet. What I don’t say is that I have peeked, and I just dread the aisles. The last time I walked through one, I saw what looked like two separate civilizations: pink slogans about kindness and rainbows on one side, blue slogans about adventure and courage on the other. The marketing was so confident in its binaries that it didn’t even feel ideological. Mernissi might call this marketing efficiency the true success of a social system: when you no longer notice it. When ideology hides in convenience. Progress, apparently, is learning to monetize stereotypes. Apply that to any domain and you will see how it magically works. To your own clothes, your food, your books, your social media feed… you name it.

When I told my husband how angry all this made me, he said, “But it’s harmless. People are just being nice.” He’s right, in a way. Nobody’s trying to hurt us. But that’s how norms work—they’re sneaky and polite. They even arrive in gift wrap. Hear my message to you: if your gift is going to come with a hidden norm, please keep it, or I will take it, give you the expected smile, and keep it in my basement. That said, I have myself bought those gifts wrapped in norms and never realized it, so I don’t blame you at all.

From some of my recent readings, I learned that by the age of three, most kids already have a sense of which toys “belong” to them and which don’t. Not because anyone sits them down to explain it, but because they watch how adults react. Kids are smart. The tragedy isn’t that society limits girls. It’s that it does so gently, in the language of care.

When I think back to that morning—the 4 a.m. NIPT low-risk results that I had waited for, for soo long, my husband half-asleep beside me, and the quiet revelation that it was a girl—I remember the sense of fullness. It wasn’t joy as much as recognition. Like I had been waiting for her without realizing it.

I want to hold onto that purity, that unadorned moment before the world got involved. Before the comments, the pink gifts, the jokes about dating, the unsolicited wisdom. Before anyone decides what kind of person she’s supposed to be.

Maybe that’s impossible. Maybe every generation tells itself it can raise its children differently, only to discover how deep the grooves of culture run. But I want to believe that awareness counts for something. That if you name the architecture, you weaken its walls.

The morning after we found out, I lay awake again, this time at dawn. I kept thinking about what it means to “know” something before you know it. We call it intuition; I call it love. But maybe it’s also something else, the wish to protect what’s not yet formed, to create a space where the unshaped can stay unshaped a little longer.

My daughter is not here yet. She has no preferences, no colors, no words. But already she exists in a world eager to tell her who she is. If I can do one thing for her, it’s to keep that world waiting for as long as I can and let her develop her own wants and needs and identities. Freedom, for me, is the ultimate expression of love.

The doctor stopped at my bedside this morning to check the incision. I watched his hands move with practiced efficiency, and I noticed how still I had become—not just my body, ordered motionless by medical necessity, but something deeper. A stillness I recognize from before. Maybe from those months of the red devil coursing through my veins, when I learned that pain has a vocabulary all its own. From the hidden void I always knew existed with my mom.

You probably think I’m going to tell you about the surgery, about the delicate procedure where they opened my skin to get to the womb and stitched closed the opening in my daughter’s spine, about the terrifying precision required to touch an unborn child. But that’s not what haunts me in these endless hours. I am in a different category now. I’m not among those women who rest peacefully, imagining nurseries and tiny clothes. Of course, my immobile body is of no interest to them in itself; what they want to know is whether this will work, whether she will walk, whether the choice I made was right.

The bed has become my monastery, my cell, my interrogation room. Four walls. A window that shows me a world continuing without me: joggers, cars, people walking on legs that simply work, thoughtlessly, miraculously. And my mom is watching over me for hours and hours. I become her meditation focus point.

The clock measures time in a way I’ve never noticed before: not hours but outcomes, not days but developments. Will she have sensation in her legs? Will she control her bladder? Will she know the simple freedom of running that I took for granted until my own body became a battleground?

I thought I understood suffering when the chemotherapy turned my body into something I didn’t recognize. The red devil—they call it that for a reason. It’s red, and it burned through me like fire, stripping away not just the cancer cells but every pretense I had about strength, about control, about who I was beneath the surface.

But this—this bed rest, this waiting, this co-living situation with my mom who refuses to leave my side—is a different torture entirely. I hate calling it torture, because I am beyond grateful to have her. Maybe a torture that will become a blessing, but it haunts for now, and I want it to haunt more, because I want my baby to stay inside as close to term as possible. Maybe my daughter loves having her grandma around, always praying for her. I am sure she does. I want her to love her. Maybe we will develop a new relationship through another newborn. This time my daughter, her granddaughter.

The physical pain has textures, boundaries. You know when it peaks; you know when it subsides. But these voids—the suspended animation between intervention and outcome, or the void between a mother and daughter—have no edges. It’s not merely the discomfort of stillness, though that is considerable, my muscles atrophying, my mind circling the same worn paths like an animal in too small a cage. It’s the weight of unknowing. The relentless prosecution of hypothetical futures. And all that while grandma is thinking something but completely silent, instead just watching over my shoulders.

At night, when the hospital quiets and I can hear my daughter moving inside me—those small flutters that are at once miraculous and heartbreaking—I play out a thousand scenarios. I see her taking her first steps, defiant and determined. Then I see her watching other children run, her eyes holding a question I cannot answer. I see her fiercely independent. Then I see her struggling with tasks that others perform without thought, and I wonder if I chose her pain, if I chose her limitations, when I chose this surgery over termination.

They don’t tell you about this particular hell. They prepare you for surgical risks, for medical complications, for percentages and probabilities. But who prepares you for the archaeology of hope? Each question excavates another: Will she walk? And beneath that: Will she resent me if she doesn’t? Will she understand I did everything I could? Will “everything I could” be enough?

Will we have this same void I am having with my mom? Will we ever find an alternative to fill the void?

I survived cancer. I survived the poison they put in my body to burn out the rogue cells. I thought I had already made the hardest journey through suffering. But the body’s pain, even at its worst, has an honesty to it. It doesn’t pretend. It doesn’t promise. This waiting and watching triangle of a mother, daughter, and grandmother, though, is all promise and awkwardness. It’s hope suspended, preserved but not alive. Hope of the void disappearing. Hope of a grandchild walking, thinking, and living independently.

Zweig’s character spoke of being kept for special processing. That phrase lodged itself in me when I read it years ago, before cancer, before this pregnancy, before I understood that some experiences process you right back, refining you down to your most essential questions. What do I owe my child? What is the price of intervention? How do we live in the space between choosing and knowing whether we chose correctly?

How do you stay calm when you’re simultaneously defendant and prosecutor, witness and judge? I chose this surgery. I made this decision. And now I must lie here—literally, metaphorically—in the bed I’ve made, waiting to learn whether I’ve given my daughter a better chance or simply a different suffering.

In my chemo days, I learned that pain is generous with its lessons. It teaches you that you’re both stronger and more fragile than you imagined. That the body is both treacherous and resilient. That survival is measured not in the absence of suffering but in what you become while enduring it.

Now, in this bed, I’m learning another lesson: that love doesn’t protect you from doubt. That maternal devotion doesn’t guarantee the right choice. That you can sacrifice everything—your comfort, your mobility, your certainty—and still not know whether it was enough.

She moves inside me now, a small shifting. My hand goes to the swell of my belly, to the site of the surgery that may change her life. I want to tell her I tried. I want to promise her mobility, independence, freedom from pain. Just like all the things my mom wants to tell me right here while watching over me. But I’ve learned too much about pain to make promises about its absence.

So instead, I lie here in this bed that is my cell, my monastery, my battleground, and I do the only thing I can do: I wait. The clock ticks. My daughter grows. My mom watches over both of us. The future approaches with all its unknowns. And I remain suspended between choice and consequence, between hope and fear, between the person I was and whoever this suffering is making me become.

After all, the void isn’t empty. I’m learning.

People try to say something. They want to empathize. They want to help. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it truly does. And sometimes… it makes everything worse.

I’ve had many sonographers during this pregnancy. They all know my baby’s story. The spina bifida, the surgery in utero, the hope… all of it.

The one who first diagnosed her was amazing. She spoke gently. She prayed for me. You could feel that she cared. Not curious. Not fascinated. Just caring. And I know she truly prayed for me. She met me later on after the surgery and gave me the warmest, most genuine hug. She was just happy to see me again, still pregnant, still going.

Others were neutral. That was fine.

Some were funny and filled the room with laughter. I liked that too.

And then there is this one.

From the beginning, her energy never felt right to me. Before the surgery, she brought an intern and started explaining my baby like a lesson. Like a case study. She seemed to enjoy the explaining a little too much.

I told myself, it’s okay. She means well. Give her another chance.

I kept giving chances.

She keeps saying the wrong things.

She calls my daughter “it.” I say “she.” She keeps saying “it.”

She is obsessed with measurements. The ventricles. The word hydrocephalus. The shunt. Always the shunt. “When will they put the shunt?” “Did they put the shunt?”

A very triggering word for me.

A word I pray every day we will never need. She repeats it like it’s nothing.

I say nothing. I swallow it. I move on.

Today I had her again. She asked about the MRI. She is obsessed with my MRIs. How long did they take? Did baby move? She insists on making me live the bad experience all over again. She insists on reopening rooms I have tried a whole weekend to close or process or whatever I did so I can move on to Monday.

I kept my answers short. She kept digging. She always digs. She does not get it.

Then she looked at the legs. There was some hyperextension on the MRI. Maybe the feet look different. We don’t even know yet.

Most sonographers take the images and send them to the doctor. That’s it.

Not her.

She started telling me about a little boy she saw on YouTube. Six years old. Same surgery. Same condition.

“He was happy,” she said. “He was smiling.”

I don’t know why this one, the happiness part, always hurts.

No one can measure happiness. Not by a smile. Not by one moment. Even perfectly healthy people are searching for happiness every day. It’s a life quest, not a medical outcome or a clinical milestone. What does that even mean? That these kids can smile. Well, I am glad. What are you expecting them to be? Miserable humans? Like you!

Then she said, “And he was reading.”

Reading.

As if that was surprising. As if that was the achievement.

We are in 2025. What do you think these children are capable of? Seriously?

I wanted to say: please. Just do your job. Take the pictures. Send them to the doctor. And stay silent.

Finally it was over. I went to see the doctor.

And then she walked in.

She made a hand sign to describe my baby’s feet. A twisted gesture. Casual. Thoughtless.

But I grew up in Morocco.

That gesture… I know that gesture. It’s the sign children used to bully kids with disabilities.

I was suddenly seeing those bullies and hearing the sounds they made to mock my brother for being deaf. The cruel mouth movements. Bah pah pah, mah mah… The laughter. All the cruelty that my brother faced with so much strength and temerity.

In one second, I wasn’t in that clinic anymore. I was a child again. Watching. Helpless.

And she used that bullying sign for my daughter.

I know she thinks she means well. I know she believes she’s being thorough, maybe even kind.

But kindness without awareness can cut deep. And she did. I left that room cut in pieces and I had to collect myself all over again.

I don’t need stories about smiling boys. I don’t need predictions about shunts. I don’t need gestures.

I need peace.

If you truly care, I will feel it and I will know it.

My daughter is not a case. She is not a lesson. She is not “it.”

She is my child. A human like every other human, with a future full of randomness that will not be summarized by the capability to give you a smile so you can get the contagious happy moment you could not find somewhere else.

Will she be happy? I don’t know. Like all of us she will have moments of happiness. Being happy is not a constant state anyway to describe the future of a human being.

None of us know what life will bring. But I hope for more than a smile. I hope for strength. For depth. For a full life.

And sometimes the most compassionate thing someone can do is simple:

Say something good. Or stay silent.

Your brain is safe, your legs are strong, and most importantly your future is wide open. You did it. You have shown us even before your birth how strong you are. I am beyond grateful for your strength and seriously inspired by it. Your grandma left today. She took care of me and, thus, you, amazingly, for two months, and I am beyond grateful for her. It’s hard for me to tell her that directly and hard to explain to you or to myself why, but I truly feel grateful. You truly have the best grandma in the world. Your dad trusted you from day 1 of diagnosis, and while I did not have a chance to trust you or doubt you for almost 48 hours as I was losing myself and my sanity, the second I woke up from my hysterical reaction, to say the least, I knew you would show me your power—and look at you, already doing it, slowly but surely.

Whether you stand on your own physically or not, you will stand on your own, and you will move on your own and navigate this magical world. Stiff legs or not is not what makes one stand.

You are my Black Swan and I love it. You exposed the fragility of all my expectations that society and norms have chosen for me and showed me how antifragile you are. You have challenged the Gaussian distributions and put yourself at the fat tails with so much pride, and I am amazed by it. You did not let anyone set who you are. You chose the tails of distributions and defined your own reality, now and in the future. Many people dream of being at the tails and can’t make it, and here you are, from day 0, hunting for exceptionality. Comfort makes people weak, and maybe that’s the reason you, or the universe, or together—the universe and you, or through you—have chosen challenge and constraints, because that’s what makes you ingenious. You will have to think about every step on a short-distance walk, and that will make you even more present and more grateful than anyone walking without even thinking or feeling their nerves and bones. This awareness is the gold people are hunting for in therapy sessions, endless meditations and retreats, and not finding it—or when they do, it often escapes within a few moments or days or weeks. You have been given the power to navigate the world with intention, and that is priceless. You will not sleepwalk yourself through the world, and for that I am already grateful to the creator for blessing me with you, and proud of you. You will not get to be a tourist in your own life. You have been chosen to live with intention and purpose and constraints. Welcome to this random world where the best adventures of life happen at the tails of distributions, and only antifragile people love it and enjoy it—and you are showing that you are one of them. I hope you continue to be one of them.

Your mind is your master; your body is just a machine. Have you ever heard of an ingenious human defined by the mechanics of their limbs? Not even athletes are defined as such. The best in the world are defined by their mind, and you got a clear one, even with larger ventricles. My one ask from you is to never, ever accept the pity of those who think a stiff leg defines a soul. Never apologize for the means by which you move. Your future is not “wide open” by chance. It is open because you will pry it open with your own two hands.

It’s 9:08. What now?

I don’t know if I am the best thing that happened to you or if I am even good enough for you. But you are the best thing that happened to me. And that’s as selfish as motherhood gets. Selfish enough that I am writing this to you before you can read it, before you can object, before you can forgive. But if you are the best thing that happened to me, then I owe you the true version of how you began, not the one I will be tempted to tell at your birthdays.

Every mother carries a first memory of her child. Most get a heartbeat, a flutter, a kick against the ribs. I got those too. But I also got a dim room at twenty weeks and a sonographer who stopped talking in the middle of a sentence. I counted, without knowing I was counting, the seconds she spent on your spine. Femur once. Head twice. The hidden lower back, again and again, until I lost count. That was how I knew, before any doctor said a word. This is the first thing you should know about how you began. Your diagnosis. I did not receive it in words. I received it in a stranger’s hesitation, in how long she was willing to look at one part of you and how little she was willing to say. And I understood it in my body, the same body that was building yours, one cell at a time, and had gotten a few of them wrong. I am sorry I did. I did my best not to, but the universe has its say. The universe does the work and I get to choose. What an irony! Yes, they gave me a « choice ». They said it gently, the way people hand you a knife handle-first, and they called it options. I could keep you or not keep you, and either way it would be recorded as my decision, my right, my freedom. They did not realize I was just a simple, selfish human. I am not a prophet. Abraham was at least asked by God; he could obey and call it faith. I was asked by a doctor sitting behind her desk and looking at a case on a screen, and whatever I answered would be called a choice. They gave me percentages, as if your future were a thing that could be measured just like the hole in your spine. It could not. Plus those percentages were pretty bad anyway. Most children with your diagnosis live in pain that does not end, and some find their way to light anyway, and no one on this earth could tell me which one you would be. So they were asking me to decide blind, and forever, about a person I already loved.

I chose you. Or, I refused to choose, which the world records as the same thing. You are two months old now, and I will not lie to you: so far, life has placed you in the camp of those who struggle. And I have learned that the choice they offered me in that room was not one choice but the first in a series that has no end. Nobody told me that keeping you meant choosing forever. A line that stays in your small body, or a needle again and again. An operation now, or a waiting that carries its own pressure, in every sense of the word. Each time they lay the options before me gently, handle-first, and each time I decide blind, and each time, some nights, I redo the arithmetic and become certain I chose wrong. And here is the second thing you should know, the thing I would rather cut out of my tongue than tell you, which is exactly why I must. Once, once only, briefly, and against everything in me, I regretted it. I regretted keeping you. The thought crossed my mind, I won’t lie. I did everything to bar the door, and it crossed anyway. I had followed Abraham’s steps up the mountain and forgotten that no one had promised me a ram. Forgotten that I was not a prophet, just a stupid human who had read the story too many times and confused herself with its hero. Prophets are given faith to carry what they cannot understand. I was given only love, and love, it turns out, is not painkiller enough for watching you hurt. I am not confessing this to be forgiven. I am confessing it so you know exactly who owns the guilt in this story, so you never once mistake it for yours, and so you never mistake yourself for its victim either. The choices were mine. All of them. You did not choose your spine, the needles, the operating rooms; I did, blind, one door at a time. So the victim’s seat is taken. I am sitting in it, and I will not move, and I did not carry you this far to watch you trapped inside victimhood and endless justifications. Please do not go there. I promise you it’s useless. What is left for you is harder and, I believe, better: to live what you did not choose without hunting for a justification to rest in. I know what I am doing, or at least I think I do. I got the choosing and you got the enduring, and now I am asking you to endure it without excuses. It is the most selfish and most serious thing I have asked of you yet. You are two months old, but please take it seriously throughout your life. I am not asking you to be strong so that I can feel absolved. I am asking because excuses are a currency, and everyone who accepts them pays with the only thing you cannot buy back: the conviction that your life is yours to build.

The third thing you should know is that the diagnosis is not the only thing I passed down to you. You come from women who were never handed choices at all. No one sat them behind a desk and offered them options with percentages attached; their lives arrived already decided, and they endured them without a word for what they were doing, because endurance was not a virtue where they came from, it was the usual. And here is what matters: they did not survive whole. Nobody in this lineage ever has. They survived in part—“the grandeur of life is that attempt,” as Toni Morrison said—and they made the attempt so fully that the attempt itself became a kind of beauty. That is your real inheritance, more than the cells I got wrong. So when I ask you to endure without excuses, understand that I am not asking you to become something extraordinary. I am asking you to become what you already are, one generation further down the line.

But there is one thing your lineage might not have passed to you, because their endurance was the kind that could be hidden. It lived inside their bodies, in places no one was invited. Yours is written on the outside. On the scars on your back and brain, the mark of everything the doctors did to keep you safe, and there will be eyes on it. Eyes at the beach, in locker rooms, and in small silences of new acquaintances. I want to prepare you for those eyes. Not by teaching you to hide. Hiding was your grandmothers’ craft, and a bit of mine too, but it is no longer available to you. I want to prepare you by handing you what I learned from hiding less and owning more. Those eyes are not dangerous because they look. They are dangerous because of what they will try to plant in you, and its name is shame. And shame needs three things to live: it needs the act, it needs you to claim the act as yours, and it needs a witness you have crowned. Take away any one of the three and shame starves. You cannot remove the scar and you should not disown it. It is the record of your survival, and disowning it would be the excuse-hunting I already forbade you. So the only piece left to you is the witness. Refuse to crown them. The eyes at the beach have no throne unless you hand them one. Your grandmothers solved this by keeping only God as their audience, their only eye; some solve it by keeping no audience at all. I swing between the two. I don’t care which you choose. I only ask that you never hand a stranger the crown, because a stranger’s gaze, once crowned, will collect rent from you for the rest of your life.

I have given you too many cold instructions without much context. I should at least tell you where you are while I write all this. You are asleep on my chest, sixteen pounds and some ounces of you, and you have no idea what you have endured so far, and that’s amazing. We are on the corner of First Avenue and 34th Street, looking straight at the Empire State Building. You are hooked to your fifth IV line in less than three weeks, and the machine has just started beeping that the syringe is now empty. But again, you don’t know any of this, and that’s amazing. You know milk, warmth, the ceiling—you love the ceiling—and maybe my voice. You grip my finger with your whole hand, the way healthy babies do, the way all babies do, because a hand is one of the many things the universe got exactly right in you. I still count, by the way. I never stopped. But the counting has changed sides. Now I count ounces, wet diapers, hours of sleep, the small ordinary numbers of keeping a little one alive. Once, the counting of a stranger’s attention told me you were in trouble. Now mine tells me, every few hours, that you are still here and everything about you is just working perfectly. I don’t even have to count. All I need to do is wait for that determined look you give me here and there. The determined look you gave me right when you made your big entrance that Thursday morning at 9:08 am. It turns out this is what most of motherhood is. Not the mountain of medical decisions. Just counting, and being wrong about what the numbers mean, and counting again. And then one look and one smile makes all the numbers go away.

One more thing, and then I will let you be a baby again. Someday, probably in a hospital bed, probably at three in the morning, or at the beach while dodging those eyes and looks on you, you will ask the question. Why me? I want you to know in advance that it has no answer, and I mean that precisely, not as comfort. The universe that got a few of your cells wrong was not aiming. It does not target people. It is not fair or unfair; it is simply indifferent and random, which is a different thing entirely, and randomness in its way is a mercy. Unfairness would mean someone chose you, and someone who chooses can be argued with, appealed to, even hated. Indifference and randomness mean there is no answer and no one to appeal to. As much as I will ask you to always advocate for yourself and never accept unfairness, I will have to demand that you accept randomness. I know this sounds cold. It is the warmest thing I own. Because the day you stop asking why me is the day the question turns around and becomes what now. And what now, unlike why me, has an answer, and the answer is yours to write.

Challenge has been both an uninvited guest and a valued friend in various aspects of my life. Life, in its unpredictable and sometimes cruel nature, often confronts us with challenges we did not choose. They barge into our lives uninvited—be it the challenge of illness, the tragic loss of a loved one, or the universal struggle of capturing meaning in a world that often feels devoid of it. These challenges, the ones that arrive uninvited at our doorsteps, can feel like an unjust burden. When they show up, we get mad, frustrated, and sometimes they make us question our own existence. They test our mettle, push us to our limits, and demand that we rise to the occasion, whether we will it or not. Unsolicited and unwanted, they become the crucibles that forge our character. But what happens when these imposed challenges become unbearable, when the scales tip from character-forming to soul-crushing?

It’s in this juxtaposition of life’s chosen and unchosen challenges that the essence of our human spirit becomes most apparent. When all goes well for a bit, we find ourselves yearning for the privilege to be challenged. We seek the ability to choose our battles, to exert our will over the circumstances that surround us.

For those like me, who have weathered the storms of life’s unwelcome challenges, there exists a profound need to reclaim our right to be challenged on our own terms. We have felt the weight of circumstances beyond our control, the agony of challenges that did not come with a choice. And so we turn to challenges we select willingly, challenges we pay money to experience, challenges that seem entirely within our control.

This is why we run long distances. This is why we enter the toughest foot races on Earth. In that pounding of our feet on the rooty, muddy terrain, we reclaim the privilege to be challenged. On the surface, it seems masochistic—putting oneself through severe physical pain, braving the elements, sacrificing comfort, all for what? A medal? Bragging rights? Hardly. What many don’t realize is that for us runners, the act of choosing our challenge restores a sense of control and autonomy that life’s involuntary challenges often rob us of.

I didn’t choose to face some of the most difficult moments in my life; they chose me. But when it comes to running miles and miles through winding trails, unpredictable weather, burning sun or freezing wind, and inevitable physical decline and injuries—that is a challenge I choose. That’s a challenge I pay for, not just in monetary terms but in months of rigorous training, discipline, and sacrifice. Why? Because the privilege to be challenged, on my terms, is a reclaiming of my human spirit. A reclaiming of my autonomy.

The same spirit that fought through involuntary challenges begins to thirst for a challenge of its own choosing. I started doing shit to my body so my body does not do shit to me anymore.

I feel like I want to vomit. I really want it out of my system. I want to stop all this. Jordan, the new friend and paramedic, asks me to keep it in. “Liquid in is better than liquid out, don’t provoke it.”

All I can think about is that I had this exact same feeling before. No one told me to keep the liquid in back then. The fucking red devil is back again, but now I chose to feel like this and I can make it stop. Making it stop will mean I abandon the race and don’t go home with my medal. That’s it. No big deal. When I felt it before, I didn’t really have a choice to make it stop. Making it stop then meant letting the cells multiply over and over and over until they are all over my breast, then my lungs, my liver, my blood and everywhere, slowly killing me. But I want to live because I love life, but most importantly as Marcel Khalife sang the beautiful lines of Mahmoud Darwish:

And I so cherish life
Because if I died
My mother’s tears would shame me

So just like I chose to not make it stop before, I decided to make it stop now—even if the decision is not a matter of life or death but just a matter of medal. But for me, it was not because of the medal; it was my way and the only way to take back control. My body challenged me before without asking me, life challenged me always and has been so permissive in doing it, but now I choose to challenge myself and have total free will to make it stop or power through it—and I chose the latter. Now you can call me a hero!! When I was battling the red devil that was battling my destructive cells trying to kill me, I was not a hero. I was just trying to survive.

Embarking on my second marathon, this time amidst the scorching Moroccan sun in Marrakech, became a journey brimming with anticipation and trepidation. Having previously conquered the iconic NYC Marathon, my primary goal was to test my endurance under the Moroccan sun.

Though I had diligently trained under the guidance of a coach for a month, my expectations for this race were intentionally modest. Marrakech served as my testing ground, a furnace under the blazing sun, a prelude to the impending Marathon des Sables awaiting me in April.

In essence, the experience unfolded as one of the most enchanting races I’ve ever encountered. Tears, an intimate companion in both marathons, played a different tune in Marrakech. Unlike the confused emotional whirlwind that gripped me in NYC, here tears flowed freely from the wellsprings of happiness, joy, and pride. Much like my anticipated performance, my expectations for the marathon’s organization were considerably subdued. A less-than-ideal prelude during registration and bib collection had set the tone, and my skepticism lingered.

Let’s delve into race day, a personal favorite among all my running exploits. The morning commenced after a restful night in a friend’s exquisite riad. Having spent the previous day exploring the Medina, reveling in the company of wonderful friends, indulging in delectable Moroccan cuisine, and culminating in a rejuvenating hammam and rfissa dinner, a restful sleep was inevitable. Clad in my race attire, I emerged from my room to beseech Ikram, the riad’s exceptional cook, for a serving of msemen—an extra boost before the marathon.

With my gear in order, a quick stretch, and a final check, I returned to devour my msemen and Moroccan tea. Rfissa the night before, and msemen with honey and tea in the morning, had become my newfound fuel for long-distance races. Ikram’s encouraging words lingered as I set forth.

Originally intending to run-walk to the start line near the Mamounia hotel, a cab proved a wiser choice after navigating the labyrinthine alleys of the medina. Sunrise, a breathtaking spectacle over the palm trees of Marrakech, painted the sky in hues of gold and amber.

My expectations for the race organization were as tempered as the morning chill, but the absence of conventional amenities turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Instead of the anticipated bag-check station and corporate stands, the marathon allowed an organic ecosystem to thrive. Local entrepreneurs emerged, offering everything from coffee and tea to msemen and boiled eggs. The absence of institutional intervention birthed a well-organized, international-friendly microcosm.

As the race neared, my anticipation of the customary national anthem, a fixture in NYC races, was met with disappointment. Hastily joining the start line after a brief detour to the toilettes, I relinquished any hopes of TV glory. The first few kilometers unfolded at a leisurely pace, a conscious choice to relish the sunrise and Marrakech’s landmarks.

Turning by the Menara mall, the atmosphere transformed. Moroccan cheers filled the air—“Tbarklah, tbarklah,” women exclaiming, “Yallah a benti, yallah,” and the rhythmic chants of “Siiiir, siiir, siiir” from children and young supporters. Yet the true magic lay in the music: Gnawa, Chikhates, Dekka Mrrakchia, and Ahwash enlivened the first ten kilometers, different bands of the same styles appearing again and again along the way.

In the absence of headphones, the marathon became a sensory immersion. But amid the joy came one moment of true sadness. Unlike the volunteer crews of New York races, the men cleaning the course of its plastic bottles were municipal workers—the same men who clean these streets every day. As I passed, one of them called across to his friend: “Wa Abdeltif—imagine, my friend, if each one of these runners gave us one dirham. Just one dirham. We would be rich.” The reality of inequality lingered a moment before the rhythm of the run carried me forward.

As the kilometers ticked by, I found myself among the elite half-marathon runners who had started an hour later. Running alongside them briefly before adjusting my pace was an unexpected delight. Amidst the diverse crowd, a group of conservative Muslim runners caught my attention. In a world colored by rising Islamophobia, my discomfort momentarily resurfaced—even I, as a Muslim, feel it sometimes. But their cheers and encouragement transcended ideological differences. One of them cheered for me, urging me to keep pushing forward, and once again I felt those tears of joy. This is the Morocco I love, where the public space belongs to everyone, and we push each other forward. It was a poignant reminder of the unity that sport can foster.

In closing, the race’s grand finale was marked by the delicious bounty of Moroccan oranges, an unmatched delight in the crisp January air. The juxtaposition of the sun’s warm embrace and the succulence of these oranges left an indelible mark on my soul. As I compose these final words before departing for JFK, I yearn to carry with me a suitcase filled not with material possessions, but with the everlasting radiance of the Moroccan sun and the sweetness of its oranges.

I am a sick woman… I am a spiteful woman. No, that’s not right. That’s his opening, not mine. Let me start again.

I am a woman of thirty-something—I won’t tell you exactly, because numbers are another kind of prison—and I live in Astoria with a man who asks me if I want water when what I need is resurrection. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s what happens when you write from underground, from the depths of your own uterus, from the place where life refuses to take hold despite all your modern interventions and ancient prayers.

But most importantly, I am free. Or at least, I exercise my freedom by showing up to this madness again and again. Not out of hope—hope is for people who haven’t bled their futures onto bathroom tiles. I show up because showing up is the only authentic act left in a world of performed selves.

Let me start with the blood. No, let me start before the blood. Let me start with the ghost.

There are three of us here: me, the narrator you’ll follow, though I might lose you; Echo, who doesn’t believe in ghosts, though she might be one; and the third—the one I buried under metaphors. She doesn’t have a name anymore, but she wants one. She’s been wanting one since I started bleeding the first time.

I write because I’m haunted. Not by demons—by almosts. By the selves I sent to die politely.

So here’s my thought: I am underground. Not literally—though sometimes I take the N train so deep under the Queensbridge it feels like a descent into hell—but philosophically, existentially, uterinely underground. I live in the space between conception and birth, between the positive pregnancy test and the blood that inevitably follows. I am Schrödinger’s mother: pregnant and not pregnant, grieving and not grieving, alone and accompanied by ghosts.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Let me tell you about Yder.

Yder—a name that can be spelled with a Y or an I or an E. It means “alive” in the Amazigh language, though I didn’t know that when the name came to me, two weeks after I learned of his existence. If we can call it existence.

The name just arrived, like he did: unexpected but immediately real. I wanted to be ready when I brought it up to my husband. Spelling first, then pronunciation, then meaning, then all kinds of arguments for why Yder was already his name in my head.

I found the spelling in a museum. “Yto,” the first artist I encountered on a recent visit to MoMA PS1—another Amazigh name, usually written with an I. But there it was with a Y, and I liked it: the way it started with two consonants, no apologetic vowel to soften the entry. Strong. Unlike my own name, which is all vowels and softness.

The next day, I found out Yder’s heart had stopped.

I knew it before the ultrasound confirmed it. That morning I’d gotten my hair cut and suddenly felt alive—the kind of alive I hadn’t felt since chemo, when the body is weak and chaotic but the mind sharpens to a point. All my pregnancy symptoms vanished. I told myself it was the haircut giving me energy, but I knew. The body whispers truths the mind isn’t ready to hear.

What is alive? In Arabic, it’s al-Hayy. Not the existent or the being, but something that transcends the physical. Objects can be alive in our perception. We animate everything. Yder gave me this insight, this ability to see life beyond heartbeats.

I held him in my hands. Shocked. Bloody. I could see him through the sac and the liquid, his tiny features hidden but present. And then, in panic, I dropped him, intentionally, onto the bathroom floor.

I felt so bad, but I told myself: at least I dropped him. I could have flushed him. Instead, I pulled him out from the midst of blood and urine, held him for thirty seconds—not the lifetime I’d imagined, but thirty seconds more than nothing.

My uterus contracted, shrinking back to its empty state. I had an appointment scheduled for the D&C procedure, but he came early. Even in death, he refused to follow my schedule. A lesson I keep failing to learn.

In my panic, I put him in a Tupperware container. Cleaned the blood. Got dressed. Put the container in the refrigerator. Somehow managed to get my brother to the airport. And then he sat there, between the leftovers and the prenatal vitamins I’d keep taking out of habit, for forty-eight hours while I figured out what to do with the physical remains of my would-be child.

I’d thought about using the verse we Muslims say when someone passes: إنا لله وإنا إليه راجعون—“We belong to God, and to Him we return.” But I didn’t want to make it religious. Not sure why. I just thought nature gave him to me and nature took him back. Simple laws of the universe. Allah gave and Allah took. Same thing, different words for different audiences. The universe offered him briefly, then reclaimed him. And I was left with a Tupperware container and questions about what “alive” means.

— To be continued —

Zee’s life moved to precise beats until about 7:15 a.m. that Thursday morning, when her front tooth chose its moment of rebellion. It must have been precisely 7:18. One minute to shuffle down the dormitory hallway to the shared bathroom. Thirty drowsy seconds of wetting the toothbrush. Another minute of brushing—and then, the break. Not like the quiet, unnoticed dissolution of other life patterns taken for granted: her father’s last confident stride through the market, or the moment his measuring tape migrated from neck to some random drawer, tangled and unused. This ending stayed sharp: the last morning she would ever start her day with mint and fluoride.

That morning, anxiety had served as a better alarm than her 7 a.m. phone alert. The morning arrived like a punch to the head—too bright, too immediate. She’d barely slept, consumed by preparing this one last college presentation. The professor had given her one last chance to redo the stochastic project that stood between her and college graduation. She had chosen to simulate the optimization of Rabat’s tram-bus network, where thousands from the outlying neighborhoods rode toward their slice of the city’s promise: students with worn textbooks, workers with dreams bigger than their pockets, but mostly those seeking their daily bread. No credentials. No destination. They would scrub floors, patch walls, carry loads—trade their sweat for dirhams. Zee’s project wasn’t just about minimizing wait times; it was about the countless lives suspended between home and hope. It had to impress. She had prioritized everything else over classes during college—internships, extracurriculars, the whole resume-building circus. Everyone said GPA didn’t matter much, until it did with this do-or-die presentation at 8:30 a.m.

In the communal bathroom, heavy with morning dampness, stinking dampness, she followed the familiar pattern: starting from the molars on her right side, her toothbrush moving up and down, then crossing over to work the left. That’s when the tooth—the one she’d been worrying like a loose thread, the one her dentist had promised would hold—simply let go. The tooth didn’t just fracture from the root. It liberated itself from the brace prison as well. A clean break. No blood, no pain, just the sudden presence of something loose floating free in her mouth. Her tongue found the broken edge where the root remained, a sharp ridge that felt nothing like the smooth tooth she’d known for years. The fragment rolled against her tongue—smaller than it should be, lighter, like a china chip in the mouth. Without thinking, she cupped her hand beneath her chin and spit, watching as the off-white fragment landed in her palm, swimming in white, fluoridated saliva. As she rinsed, her fingers closed around it with fierce, protective anger, every vein in her hands pulsing with the urge to crush this tiny saboteur. But she couldn’t let it slip down the drain, this evidence of her body’s betrayal, this piece of herself that had chosen today of all days to abandon ship.

She had felt it coming for days, that treacherous looseness. The tooth had been barely hanging there, and for three nights leading to the presentation, she would lie awake wondering if tomorrow would be the day it finally gave up. Would the braces hold it in place if it did? She’d clung to the dentist’s promise that it would be fine, a promise made carelessly over the phone just a week ago when Zee had begged for an appointment. Zee had learned to trust the dentist out of necessity, not choice. A trust that had been born in her teenage years, when tooth pain would strike the night before an exam—the kind of pain that made you bang your head against the wall. She remembered her father’s voice in those emergency pharmacies, normally so confident in his prêt-à-porter shop, turning soft and pleading as he negotiated with night-shift pharmacists. “I will stop by to pay the bill tomorrow,” he’d say, one hand on her shoulder, the other pulling out the few bills he’d managed to scrape together. Those same hands that trembled counting cash for painkillers had once moved with authority across fine fabrics, measuring the dentist for her graduation suit. “The finest suit in Rabat,” the father would promise, his measuring tape draped around his neck like a badge of pride. “When you open your practice, everyone will ask who dressed you.” The dentist would beam, adjusting the lapels, promising to send all her colleagues to his shop. “And we’ll take care of little Zee’s teeth properly then,” she’d add, ruffling Zee’s afro as she passed.

But promises, like fabric, could wear thin. He had dressed her through dental school—suits pressed and fitted on credit. Now the dentist kept her own ledger, having conveniently forgotten the merchant who had clothed her through those lean years. She wielded her power in refused appointments, turning away his daughter over unpaid fees. The braces themselves had been a last gesture of professional courtesy, installed in the year her father rolled down his shop’s metal gate for the last time. And so Zee stood here: twenty-two with high school braces, about to step into a prestigious internship, watching her front tooth wage its rebellion against neglect. She fled the bathroom before anyone could witness her transformation. Before someone could look up, expect a morning smile, see the gap, the horror. The one-minute walk in the dormitory corridor stretched endless, each door a potential witness she couldn’t face. Her room, when she finally reached it, felt less like sanctuary and more like a trap. Fifty-five minutes until she needed to leave.

The left lateral incisor had chosen this morning to rewrite her carefully crafted plans. The phone-screen mirror confirmed what her tongue already knew: the gap was impossible to hide, sitting there like a black hole in her smile, right where everyone would look when she opened her mouth. She reached for her phone to call the dentist, then remembered she was out of minutes. She could text her father, but what could he do? Start another war of words with the dentist? Remind her again of ancient debts and suits worn on credit?

Time slipped away with cruel indifference. Her PowerPoint slides waited, full of charts and calculations about optimizing transit systems, about saving minutes in other people’s lives. But here she stood, frozen. All her own carefully optimized minutes crumbling around her. Should she go to the professor’s office now, try to explain? But how do you explain a missing front tooth without the whole sorry history of unpaid debts and professional grudges spilling out?

Her tongue kept finding the sharp edge of the remaining root, but also touching the hanging brace. And then it hit her. Super glue! She needed super glue. The streets would be waking up now. Somewhere in this city, a hardware store had to be opening its doors. She threw her coat over her pajamas, jammed her feet into unlaced sneakers, and put the tooth in her coat pocket, wrapped in tissue like a relic. Most shops still slumbered behind metal shutters. She walked fast, head down, rehearsing in her mind how to ask for super glue without showing her teeth. Just as she’d settled on a strategy, Sarah from her class appeared, suddenly crossing the street, her cheerful greeting wilting as Zee managed only a closed-mouth nod, one hand instinctively rising to shield her face. Two blocks on, she pressed herself into a doorway to avoid her downstairs neighbor—the one who treated brief hellos as invitations for lengthy conversation. She nearly convinced herself the entire city had conspired to stay closed when she finally saw the hardware store, its lights just flickering on.

Back in her room, hands shaking as she tore open the super glue packet. Her phone showed three missed calls from her project teammate—they were supposed to do a final run-through before the presentation. 8:30 a.m. had never felt so close. The root felt sharper now against her tongue, like a warning. She held the tooth up to the mirror, trying to map its exact position. One shot at this. The glue trembled at the packet’s tip. Too much and it would show. Too little and the tooth would fall again, maybe this time in front of the professor. She touched the glue to the brace, careful, precise, her hands steadier than she’d expected. The tooth clicked back into place against the brace’s metal framework. There was a tiny gap, but hardly visible. She held it there, watching the seconds tick by on her phone. Three minutes to set. The sharp scent of the adhesive filled her nostrils, chemical and final. Every second felt like hours. Her arm ached from holding the position. She didn’t dare breathe too hard. The tooth stayed. In the mirror, everything looked normal—if you didn’t know to look for the thin dark line of the fracture, you might never notice. She tried a careful smile. Then another. The tooth held.

She threw on the blazer and pants she’d laid out the night before, grabbed her computer, and ran. She made it ten minutes late, earning a sharp look from the professor. The presentation flowed better than she’d dared hope, her words careful and measured to avoid disturbing her emergency repair. Her numbers were solid, her simulations elegant—the optimization of Rabat’s transit system presented in clean algorithms and clear graphs. She got her B+, and more importantly, kept her dignity and her tooth.

That super-glued tooth became her silent companion through nine months of her prestigious internship, like a secret she couldn’t share, marking the exact distance between herself and the other interns. During team lunches—inevitable, really—they would study her mouth with that particular kind of corporate curiosity that masked judgment, their own teeth gleaming with the immaculate symmetry of early and complete interventions. Their smiles clearly mapped different lives entirely: regular cleanings, retainers lost and promptly replaced, emergency appointments for wisdom teeth that were scheduled rather than endured. Zee would sit through each lunch, carefully maintaining the angle of her head, fighting the urge to probe the hardened glue with her tongue. One 90-degree flip could transform her from promising young consultant to social outcast.

But when she was alone in her studio, she probed it and flipped it like a tiny act of rebellion, transforming her corporate smile into something more honest. The raw truth of her presence in those sleek office corridors. Every achievement balanced on the razor’s edge of the gap it revealed—a space that existed between her carefully constructed professional facade and the reality of who she was, held together by super glue and determination.

Two bodies with genitalia that touch occasionally. They sit and eat the meat of slaughtered creatures over a dead branch. They chew, swallow. The taste of death is invisible but there, not unpleasant, but real. The world has offered its flesh, and they consume it. Their eyes meet once or twice, just long enough to know the other is there, also consuming.

Sometimes, they sat across from each other in gardens, trains, white-cloth tables, and all that bohemian kingdoms could offer. They ate flesh once more, though this time it was cooked, arranged carefully on plates, and offered by strangers in white coats. Their eyes were locked longer now. The hunger had grown sharper. They touched again.

They stole a feather and took it with them back. She said she will frame it. Maybe as a reminder of how they can consume flesh without smelling death.

“Weekend not sure but during the week would work I think. Let’s play it by ear.”

That’s what I said. Not a no. Not a yes. Just a small window into the uncertainty. He knows why. He knows the embryo transfer is sometime next week. That we have no visibility yet—not on the date, not on the shots. They’re still monitoring my cycle. Every day a different update. Every morning another blood test or ultrasound. Nothing to hold onto.

And still, he replied: “I would love to lock in Thursday night. They like to plan like me.”

I read the message and felt something twist inside me. What the fuck.

The friends live half a block away. We can truly play it by ear. I had been dropping hints for weeks. Reminding him, gently, sometimes not so gently, that I can’t make plans right now. That I would love to plan. I would love to say yes to dinner, drinks, a concert, anything. But life has stripped that ability from me.

Over a year of trying. Failing. Waiting. More failing. And now this—another try, another shot in the dark. Another exercise of my humanity and womanhood, exercising my freedom. Showing up amidst the uncertainty and fear. Not believing, just showing up with purpose. Believe and hope and all that rosy talk does not work for me. Freedom speaks deeply to me and I show up in the chaos. I am telling the world I am a free woman. I don’t believe, but I don’t run either. Sometimes I forget and fall for the mundane promises of hope. So I fell for it again and was hoping that the one person “sharing” this journey with me would understand—the person I married. But he still doesn’t. He does not refuse to understand, but he does not.

We fought. It was sharp and ugly. He apologized, but it didn’t touch the part of me that needed it. It felt like someone placing a single band-aid on a wound bleeding through the floor. You gotta clean the wound with alcohol and let it burn like hell. Burning but clean.

So I left. I walked. No direction. Just away. Far enough to make the buzzing in my chest stop. I stayed out for a while.

When I got back, the kitchen was clean. He had scrubbed the sink, wiped the counters, even put away the dishes I’d left that morning. He looked up when I opened the door and mumbled: “Sorry.” Many times. Again.

I didn’t say anything. I headed to the shower. I wanted to wash the day off my skin. Let the water hit where nothing else could reach.

When I stepped out, he was standing nearby, trying again. Mumbling sorry to the tensioned air around us.

I walked across the hallway and went to bed.

“Do you want a glass of water?”
“Do you want the air conditioning on?”
“Should I scratch your feet?”
“Do you want the bedsheet over your shoulder?”

I got out of bed, ran downstairs. Not from him, exactly. From the questions. From the logistics.

He followed me, running. “Air conditioning?”
“No thank you.”
“The remote?”
“No thanks.”
“Something to watch?”
“No.”
“A specific book from the library?”
“No thanks.”

I don’t want any of these questions. Not one. After ten years together, he still doesn’t get that. After ten years, I’m still being asked the stupid logistical questions after a big fight. Not once—not once—has he asked: “How do you feel?”

How do I feel?

I feel fear. It’s eating me alive. Fear of failing again. Fear of getting nothing. Fear of getting something and then losing it. A baby that doesn’t implant. A baby that makes it to eight weeks, twelve weeks—and then doesn’t make it. Fear of becoming that woman with the shadow womb, like the Empress in Hofmannsthal’s opera. A body filled with absence.

He interrupted my spiral. “Would you like this lamp on?”

I shook my head. Another no.

He started pacing. Back and forth. Trying to catch my eye. “Would you like me to bring your water bottle?”

I snapped. “I don’t want these questions again. These logistical questions.”

He paused, held still for a second. Then said: “So what do I do? How do I prepare myself for next week? That’s not logistical.”

A text pinged. Then another. Then a third. On a normal day, he’d be up and across the room before the screen even lit up. There’s nothing that keeps him from his phone or from any kind of distraction—unless he’s inside me. And even then I can feel his mind tugging sideways. He’s like that—tuned to every noise, every vibration, every micro-interruption. Red lights, sirens, footsteps in the hall. Everything is a signal. Everything is urgent. The kind of person who runs for the subway even if the next one’s three minutes behind. Can’t let anything pass. Can’t not know.

But this time, he waited. A full minute, maybe less. Then he went upstairs to check his phone.

When he came back, he was reading something on his phone. About the process. I didn’t even know he was reading about it. I was busy writing this down—these exact words—to distract myself. To keep from breaking. To therapy myself, since the only person who should know what I’m going through has no idea. Isn’t asking. Or isn’t hearing the answer.

He interrupted again: “Are we doing blastocyst or…?”

“What do you mean?”

“Day 3 or day 5.”

“Five. I guess. I don’t know. These are exactly the questions I don’t want.”

I ran again, upstairs.

He followed, whispering over and over: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I opened the bedroom door and said: “It’s fine.”

Then I jumped into bed.

But it wasn’t fine.

I told myself, whatever you’re feeling, you have to show up again tomorrow. Exercise your freedom. Keep trying. Not out of false beliefs and hope, but out of agency and freedom.

Why am I crying? I guess I am just grieving. Preemptively. Fearfully. Realistically. Grieving the baby you might not have, the woman you thought you’d be, the support you thought you’d get, and—importantly—the intimacy you thought would carry you through this. It’s a loneliness so vast it feels like madness. And that’s fine. Alone and free.

They’re coming closer. I can feel the sidewalk get tighter. That’s how it always is, isn’t it? When the street narrows, when it gets quiet. Like you don’t belong there. Not anymore. I’ve been leaning against the wall too long, but I’m not moving. Not yet. No reason to.

One of them’s looking around, like she’s looking for an exit. Or a reason. She doesn’t see me. She doesn’t see either of us. She’s just trying to keep moving. That’s how it is. Always keep moving.

It’s the other girl, the one behind. She’s the one who sees. I can tell she’s already figured something’s off. Not just me, but us. Her eyes are darting around, she’s pulling the other one along like she’s trying to drag her out of here, but something’s pulling her back, too. She’s walking faster now, but her legs are too stiff. She knows it, I can see it.

I don’t move.

She’s already trying to make her feet go faster, but it’s not natural. She’s holding on to her friend, like she’s about to snap. Her eyes flick to me again, then quickly away. That’s the thing. They always look. That’s the thing they don’t say, but it’s the truth: they always look, and then they always turn away. Like they know what I am before I even move.

I watch the way she’s holding her friend’s arm. Not gently, not even casually. She’s gripping it. Why?

I know what she’s thinking. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m not. But I know it anyway. I know it by the way her eyes keep flicking back, and how her steps are faster now. How her fingers tighten around her friend’s skin. I know it’s not me, it’s not even my body—it’s the space I take up in the world. I know it.

I hate it.

She’s moving faster now. No more pretense. The energy’s rising, she can’t stop it. She’s scared. She’s scared of me, and she doesn’t even know why.

Does she even see me?

I’m leaning against the wall. My hands are in my pockets. I’ve done nothing.

I shift. Just a little. Just enough to make her think I’m moving. She looks again. This time, it’s different. She’s not trying to hide it anymore. Her eyes widen, but she doesn’t look at me directly. She looks at me out of the corner of her eye, like she’s checking for something, checking for… something she’s already decided about me.

She’s scared. And I can see it.

I never asked for this. But no one asks. You just get cast into a role. Predator. It’s so easy to be the monster.

What if I’m not?

What if I’m just here? Just standing? Just… existing?

I’ve seen it before. On the subway. On the street. On the bus. Same thing. People get on, they look, then they look away, like I’m already a part of the world they’ve decided not to see. I’ve sat in crowded trains before, just sitting there, my back against the pole, humming to myself, but the whole car clears out. Clears out for nothing. I haven’t even moved. Just my face. Just my teeth that didn’t choose to be this way.

I hate how it feels.

I hate that it doesn’t even matter what I do.

She pulls at her friend again. Harder now. Their pace is getting frantic, like they can’t outrun what’s in their heads. But what’s in their heads? What did I do?

It’s not me. It’s the space. It’s the way I’m here. The way I breathe, the way I take up space, like I don’t belong. I feel the weight of that. I always feel the weight of it. The way people look past me, or step aside, or wait until I’m out of their way, like they don’t want to be near me. But why? Why can’t I be here?

I’m just trying to live.

They’re moving faster now. She’s almost running, like the faster they go, the safer they’ll be. But there’s nowhere to go. Not really. This street goes on forever. She doesn’t know that.

I don’t move.

They don’t know that.

She’s almost at the corner now, jerking her friend, practically dragging her along. The other girl’s already looking away, too. She’s not seeing me anymore. She’s seeing a ghost she made up in her head.

She turns the corner, the sound of her heels hitting the pavement sharper now. I can’t even see them anymore. But I hear it. The door’s opening somewhere. The bell rings. They’re inside.

Inside what? What kind of store? I didn’t even see it.

I’m not sure what to do now. Do I move? Do I follow? Or just stay here?

I stand there a moment longer.

I pull a cigarette out of my pocket, light it, let the smoke curl in the air like it’s not real. Maybe I’m not, either. Maybe I’m just a moment waiting to be erased.

But I don’t care.

I throw the match on the ground and watch it burn.

From the back of the book: “If you are picking up this book in a bookstore, a library, or wherever you are on planet Earth—this book is not for you. You are obviously free to read it, but you are responsible for your own time, its opportunity cost, and whatever ideas this book seeds in your head. This book is for readers not living on planet Earth. They are my only audience and my only responsibility.”

Dear reader, I trust that once you comprehend my words, you will also understand how agonizing it is to write them. It is a torment to write for strangers, for beings whose very status as “reader” is uncertain. Writing for you is difficult. I don’t know you, I don’t understand you. So I will make no assumptions about you, except one: that one day—hopefully soon—you will grasp what I am trying to say. I believe that day will come quickly, for we humans must find a way to communicate with you, whatever you are, wherever you may be—on whatever planet, star, or system you inhabit.

If and when we can reach that understanding, we will then, in turn, attempt to explain who we are. But I refuse to outsource that task, that explanation of our nature, to others. I want to do it myself—in this book, in this chapter. I want to explain to you who we are.

But first, before we get to that, I must tell you why we are here. We are here because there is nowhere else to go. We had no choice but to reach you, to come to you. Once we discovered the minerals here, there was no alternative. For two reasons. First, we need somewhere to dispose of our waste, our leftovers. It’s as simple as that. Our system cannot sustain itself without continual production, and if we produce, we must discard the old. Our planet can no longer handle the things we throw away. So we needed to find a new place—assuming that place could take our refuse.

Now, I’m not making this assumption alone—this is a collective belief. All those who are trying to reach you share it. You might ask: If you already have everything you need, why keep producing more? Why continue to bring in new things if you can’t throw away the old? The answer isn’t clear from an individual perspective, but from a systemic one, it’s simple: the system won’t work without it. It depends on continual consumption, on always obtaining new things.

Let me move on, though, because there’s a second reason we’re here. The second reason is more straightforward: we need resources. We need minerals to produce new things to send back to you. It’s that simple. We take from you—your resources—and return them to you in a new form, once we’ve transformed them, used them, and got sick of them.

Now that I’ve explained why we’re here, I must tell you who we are. And for that, I apologize for the delay. One shall introduce herself first. Please understand, that is not me being rude to you; it is just a special circumstance. We had to begin with the why. I had to first, bluntly and transparently, show you why we came here.

Describing who we are will be difficult. I trust you know what a square is—or if not, please write me a letter in your language, and I will find someone to explain it. A square is a shape with four angles, all equal. Now, if you were to ask the square to describe itself, it would likely fail. It’s so familiar, so inherent to its nature, that it cannot describe its own essence. And that is the difficulty I face in explaining who we are. I will tell you everything about us—the shape we take, the colors, the actions, the evolution—but I will inevitably miss the simplest truths.

One day, if you return here, perhaps to liberate yourself or your world, you will understand what I mean. And then you will see the four angles I failed to describe. Our simplest “truth.” But I tell you this now, so that when the time comes, you won’t blame me.

Let me begin with the physical as I describe who we are. First, we have a face. It has two eyes, a mouth, a nose, and two ears. There are other creatures with faces too—animals, many of them, though not all. You might encounter some of them, if they have traveled with the people who reached you. A cat, perhaps, or a dog. But for now, let’s focus on us.

How do I explain a face? And what is its purpose? Think of it like a house, or something similar in the place where you live. Our eyes are the windows. They have blinds, but we only use them when we go to sleep. If you look through them, you will see something, but it will be ambiguous, unclear. Still, it’s better than nothing, and that’s why we always look through the windows when we communicate with each other. When one of us dies—meaning their life ends—we lower their blinds forever.

But if you want to understand more, just like you would do with a house, the owner has to open not just the windows, but also the door. That’s where the mouth comes in.

Then we have ears—these small, often overlooked windows on either side. They are always open, yet seldom used. They serve more like the tiny, functional side windows in houses, usually just there to let in some faint breeze, especially if someone is taking a steamy hot shower. The door is really what gets used the most. People here can’t keep their mouths shut.

Now, the nose—or rather, the nostrils. These are the openings through which we breathe. They are a kind of gateway, not for seeing or speaking, but for sensing. The nose allows us to inhale the world, to smell what is near. It’s less direct, less immediately useful, but it informs us. People who are blind—meaning their windows are either blurry, or dark, or their blinds are always lowered even if they are alive—their nose becomes even more important. It kind of becomes their eye. But only for them, not for the people looking through nostrils. While it looks like they are disadvantaged because of their eyes, they are also advantaged, because they have more safety. People can look at each other through the eyes and understand something, but cannot do that even if they stare at one’s nostrils all day. Because it is through the nose that we receive subtle, often unconscious information about the world around us.

But overall, the most frequent use of all these members is to scratch. We scratch our ear or nose, between our eyes, not because of any need but to feel our body—the body that the community, rituals, and social structures want to erase. The scratch is our small act of rebellion. None of us want to rebel beyond the scratch, because we are terrified of freedom, of personal responsibility. We claim we want choice, but we work hard to escape its burden. We cannot even imagine being actually responsible for our life, for all its disasters to be our own making; we just dissolve into community and claim altruism to escape.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking about how to protect your resources and your people from these cowards hiding behind the crowd, taking responsibility for nothing more than a face scratch or touch. About how to read us, to understand who holds power over whom. You believe that if you watch closely enough—through the windows, through the door—you might catch something useful. A hint. A strategy. And you’re right to be suspicious. We all say kind things now, but kindness is cheap currency in unfamiliar lands. So maybe you’re wondering if we wear masks. Maybe you’re starting to guess that we all look the same, that the face is a performance. And you’re not wrong. We’ve spent our entire history learning how to perfect our masks—how to keep the flames inside while the facade stays calm, even charming. But we never found a mask for the hand. So look there. Watch the hands. They will betray us. They translate what we try to suppress. The trembling, the tightening, the reaching, the recoiling—it’s all there. Every secret leaks through the fingers. The sweaty hand, the hesitant one, the clenched fist, the quiet twitch. The hand is the last honest part of us.

Everyone is looking at a screen. The screens are between 6 and 13 inches. Everyone is wearing headphones, either white or black. Fingers move from keyboards to screens. Eyes are moving fast. No one is looking at me. Not even him. He just stood up and left. It looks like he got a call. I know he got a call. I know everything about him. I can even sense his heartbeats. I guess he could not catch the call and decided not to call back. Now he is back to his seat because he is hungry, it’s lunch time and that salad has been sitting for a while since the server put it on his table. He finally grabbed the fork and started to eat. I know he is eating because I can observe and feel every chew but I don’t think he is aware. He is really just moving his fork, then his mouth is just doing the job. Instead, his focus is still on the screen, like everyone else in the café. Does he even realize he is chewing? I could tell him. But would it even matter? I think it would matter, for the salad. Those plants lost their life for him and now he is chewing without paying attention whatsoever. So narcotic. He does not even look at it before it makes its way to his mouth. He got the call again and left. I waited for a while and he is not back so I am going to leave too. I will apologize to the salad leftovers on my way out. I will also see him walking back and forth the café’s corridor as he is getting yelled at by his agent who is the caller. Had he respected the salad or himself, the agent would have respected him too. But he is too absorbed that he lost all respect. I mean real respect. Not the stupid fake fan base respect. I mean my respect. I watch him very closely. Mostly at the café, sometimes through the window but I don’t like being creepy because I have self-respect but also because I don’t have a good view. I can’t wait for the new neighbor to join. I will become his friend and then I will lose all kind of self-respect and use his window to watch him. I will keep watching him until he sees me. I know why he is not seeing me yet. I know it and understand it very well from the therapy notes that I steal from my colleague. I copy them, I sneak them out and I study them very well. That’s how I know he is not ready to meet me yet. But that’s also how I know that he will only get better if he sees me, accepts me, and loves me with such carelessness about the world. I won’t push him to it though.

I don’t see him on my way out, I guess he is in the restrooms. I want to double check but they are gendered and I can’t go into the men’s restrooms so I am giving up and just leaving. I feel hungry. There is a good Chinese place around the corner so I will go get something there since I got some cash.

“Helloooooo Hellllo, what can I get for youuuu”

“Hi,….can IIII get a scallion pancake?”

The TV turned on by itself at 7 am. Ms. Blake stirred, her eyes struggling to focus on the sudden intrusion of light and sound. She knew it was not an alarm clock. She does not remember the last time she set an alarm. Anxiety has been her alarm, not just for sleep, for everything. It has been her clock.

“Good morning, Ithaca,” a chipper voice announced. “I’m Tessa Bright, and you’re watching WENY News at 7. Our top story this morning: last night’s unexpected summer storm that left parts of our city in the dark.”

Ms. Blake squinted at the screen, taking in the impeccably dressed news anchor. Tessa Bright lived up to her name, all gleaming white teeth and golden hair coiffed into submission. On her desk, there was a big cup with steam coming out of it. Behind her, there were many screens on sleek monitors with maps and pictures of the weather and numbers that kept changing.

“Downtown and the Commons area experienced a blackout from 3:30 AM to nearly 6 this morning,” Tessa continued. “Crews worked through the night to restore power. We’ll have more on this story, including how local businesses are coping, coming up after the break.”

She stares at the man sitting at his desk, staring at a computer screen, when suddenly his phone buzzes. He picks it up, sees a message from his friend, and instantly the conversation bubble pops up: “Dude, you’re getting a Dell!” It was the start of commercials. Ms. Blake’s brain finally caught up with her surroundings. Her hand shot out, looking for her phone on the cluttered side table. Instead of the usual glow of notifications, her fingers met only a dark, unresponsive screen.

“No, no, no,” she screamed, memories of the previous night crashing over her like a wave of icy water. The live stream. The comment. Her desperate, ill-advised confession.

She jumped out of bed, ignoring the protesting creak of her joints and the dull throb in her hip. The studio apartment, barely 500 square feet, felt suffocating as she stumbled around, eyes looking everywhere frantically in search of her charger. She had totally forgotten that it was still plugged in from a few hours ago.

“Where is it?” she hissed, pushing aside a stack of psychology journals that teetered precariously on her desk. A solid, old-fashioned piece that had belonged to her grandmother. Filled—no, littered—with clutter. Scattered among client files and half-finished case notes were printouts of Nark’s Instagram posts, scribbled with her own feverish annotations.

She shuffled past the kitchenette, grimacing at the stack of empty takeout containers and cans of LaCroix. A neglected fruit bowl held a single, withered apple.

“Come on, come on,” Ms. Blake muttered. “Did I really post that? Oh God, Nark must think I’m insane. Or worse, what if he didn’t even care? What if—”

Her bare foot caught on something thin that went rolling under her arches, nearly sending her sprawling. She looked down to see a tangle of clothes on the floor, the charging cord she’d been searching for peeking out like a mocking serpent. Still plugged to the wall.

With trembling hands, she plugged it into her phone, cradled it in her palms, bringing it close to her face as if proximity might wake it up faster. “Why is it taking so long? Maybe I should unplug it and try again.” She finally spotted a faint glow. The white rectangle appeared, a thin red line crawling across its left edge. Then she finally exhaled when the screen blinked to life: a numerical clock, 7:04.

No new notifications.

Ms. Blake sagged against the wall, relief washing over her. The comment hadn’t posted. Her moment of reckless honesty had been thwarted by a dead battery and a “city”-wide blackout. She allowed herself a shaky laugh, the tension draining from her skeleton.

Then she saw the voicemail icon. Three messages, all from her supervisor.

“Shit,” she breathed, the momentary relief evaporating. She pressed play on the first message, her supervisor’s clipped tones filling the room.

“Good morning, it’s Dr. Hendricks. I’m calling about the overdue report for the Jacobson case. I don’t want to sound inconsiderate, but you have really been slacking in this case. But the patient likes you, so please don’t let me make decisions I don’t like. Can you submit it by 8am? I don’t want the system to flag it. My hands will be tied then. Thanks, and hope you are ok. I heard about the blackout. Call me back.”

She glanced at the clock again. 7:07 AM. She had about 50 minutes.

Ignoring the growl of her empty stomach and the persistent ache in her hip, she threw herself into the chair at her desk. Her laptop whirred to life, and she pulled up the half-finished report on the Jacobson case. She started typing where she had stopped, the report-language coming out of her fingers on its own. A 33-year-old software engineer who had sought therapy to deal with… The sentences assembled themselves the way they always did, saying everything and nothing.

As she typed the last sentence of her report, a weak knock at the door made her jump. She glanced at the clock—7:55 AM. Five minutes to spare.

Saving the document quickly, she limped to the door. She opened it to find the neighbor standing there with a concerned expression.

“Ms. Blake,” he said, his eyes searching her face. “I just wanted to check in. How did everything go with your patient last night? Is everyone okay?”

For a moment, Ms. Blake stared at him blankly. Then she remembered her hastily concocted story from the night before.

“Oh! Yes, yes, thank you for asking,” she said, forcing a smile. “It turns out my replacement was able to handle the situation. Everything’s fine now.”

His face relaxed into a relieved smile. “That’s wonderful to hear. Well, I won’t keep you any longer. Have a great day, Ms. Blake!”

As he turned and walked away, Ms. Blake felt a sudden wave of anger wash over her. She shut the door perhaps a bit harder than necessary, her jaw clenching.

“Ms. Blake,” she muttered mockingly as she made her way back to her desk. “Always Ms. Blake. Never my first fucking name. Never just… me.”

She sank into her chair. When was the last time anyone had used her first name? Her clients called her Ms. Blake. Her colleagues referred to her as Dr. Blake. Even—the neighbor? Seriously?

It was as if her individual identity had been slowly eroded.

It’s 7:58. She pushed her existential crisis aside and clicked “Send” on the report.

As soon as the email whooshed away, she found herself opening Instagram, her thumbs moving of their own accord to Nark’s profile. His latest post showed him grinning at the camera, a picturesque sunrise behind him.

“Feeling blessed this morning,” the caption read. “Last night, I was struggling, but my amazing support group of fans lifted me up. Your messages of love and encouragement mean the world to me. Remember, we’re all in this together! #MentalHealthMatters #GratefulHeart”

She scrolled through the thousands of supportive comments, reading every comment like she was reading a captivating book, until it all started repeating the same stuff, fans echoing each other. She moved to his stories, watching as Nark effortlessly moved through a series of core exercises, his sculpted abs on full display. His abs were tight. They showed clear and hard. Rope slapping concrete. His feet leaving and returning to the ground. Sweat running down. It was good. It was perfect. Rope thrown away, then he squatted. The muscles bunched and moved under the skin. They were strong muscles. They looked useful. The pull-ups were hard. His stomach pulled in. The muscles on his sides stood out. End of story. The next story showed his post-workout meal—a vibrant green juice next to a plate of perfectly poached eggs on avocado toast.

A sharp pain in her lower abdomen interrupted her scrolling. Ms. Blake shifted uncomfortably, suddenly aware of the gnawing emptiness in her stomach and a more pressing discomfort. She’d been ignoring her increasing constipation for days, pushing it aside like so many other aspects of her physical health.

As she stood, intending to finally address her body’s needs, a notification popped up on her phone. Another message from her supervisor.

Ms. Blake hesitated, her hand hovering over the phone. The responsible thing would be to check the message immediately. But a small, rebellious part of her whispered that it could wait. She silenced her phone and headed for the bathroom.

She lifted the toilet seat and sat down. The air smelled of nothing much—neither fresh nor dirty. It was just there, indifferent.

She tugged at her pajama pants, pulling them to her knees, her underwear sliding down with them. A brief moment of coolness touched her skin as she sat, her shirt hiked up over her stomach. The effort began, that straining force from deep inside, like something primal. Her body leaned forward, her head dropping toward her knees, elbows pressing into her thighs.

Her eyes wandered down, catching on her underwear, lying crumpled and limp between her legs. She squeezed harder, her face twisted with effort, chest heaving as her body fought to expel what it held onto. Her face got closer to the fabric, and without thinking, she reached down and grabbed the middle of her underwear. She paused, catching her breath from the strain. Then, as if led by instinct, she brought the fabric up close, closer than she’d ever let it come before.

The smell hit her. Not dirty. Not clean. Just hers. Something uniquely her own, a scent that belonged to no one else. She breathed it in, her mind floating somewhere between disgust and fascination. There was a strange comfort in it. Just raw, human scent. It was intimate, secret, even shameful.

Her body pushed again, the pain tightening in her gut, but her mind stayed on the scent. It was as if, for a fleeting moment, she was connected to something deeper inside her—something buried beneath all the rules, all the decorum, all the masks. She let out a small sigh, the kind that slips out when no one’s around to hear it, and in that sigh, there was a release.

Her phone lit up. She could see it from across the open bathroom door. She ignored it. She stood up, flushed, washed her hands.

She left and picked up the phone. Nark’s face filled the screen. A new post. She clicked. He was smiling. Always smiling.

“Remember, you’re never alone,” the caption said. “Reach out. I’m here.”

She stared at the words and opened the message box.

“Nark,” she typed. Then stopped. Deleted it. “Dear Nark.” No. Delete.

“I’m not okay,” she wrote. She hit send before she could think.

The message showed as read. Her heart raced. She typed more.

“Your posts. They affect me. I can’t stop thinking about them. About you. I’m a therapist. I think you should know better.”

Send.

Read.

She waited. The room was quiet. Too quiet. Her breath sounded loud.

An hour passed. Two. She refreshed Instagram. Nothing.

Then a notification. Nark had posted a new story. She clicked.

It was a screenshot. Her message. Her words. But no name. No picture. Just the words.

“Look at this,” Nark’s voice said. He sounded angry. “Some people don’t understand. They try to bring us down. They’re jealous. They’re weak. We’re not. We’re strong. Together.”

Comments flooded in. Hundreds. Thousands.

“Who is this loser?” “Ignore the haters, Nark!” “What kind of therapist talks like that? Fake!” “We love you, Nark! Don’t let them get to you!”

Ms. Blake’s phone slipped from her hand. It hit the floor. The screen cracked. Like her heart. Like her mind.

She curled up on the bed. The TV was still on. Tessa Bright was still smiling.

“And now, the weather,” Tessa said. “Looks like more storms ahead.”

Ms. Blake closed her eyes. The room went dark. The storm was already here, again.

I wish I were a thing. Anything. A chair, a book, a TV, a gun. Anything with a clear goal. A chair serves so someone can sit. A book tells a story. A TV shows stories. A gun kills and ends stories.

And here I am, human, lost in the endless search for a specific purpose. Am I just a woman destined to bear and give life? If that’s so, then I’ve failed. Failed like the broken chair, the book with missing pages, the TV with busted speakers, the gun with no ammunition. And yet people still insist I am defined by abilities beyond what my biological body has failed to fulfill. Fine. But still—who am I?

Things don’t wrestle with such questions. They just exist. They sit in place, waiting for their purpose to be fulfilled, until they break and end up in the landfill. They don’t spiral. They don’t debate. They don’t invent philosophies of meaning. They just function. Purpose at its core. Fulfillment. Simple, isn’t it?

How much sun do I need before I finally become like a thing? Clear. Defined. Useful. How many cafés do I need to sit in? How many books do I need to read? How many mountains must I stare at before something inside me unclenches and I feel purposeful again?

I am tired. Tired of telling myself I’ll find clarity in the next sunrise, the next cup of coffee, the next walk through nature. Tired of claiming that a mountain will stare back at me with its majesty and fix me. My rituals don’t work anymore. Maybe they’ve taken on a new purpose: not filling my cracks but amplifying the void. Even the rituals have turned against me. And that’s why I don’t want to be a ritual anymore. I want clarity. I want to be like the chair, the book, the TV. Defined. No confusion, no spirals. Just existing. Just being.

The mere idea of becoming a thing brings me joy. Lightness. Finally the madness would stop. Finally I would have a single clear goal. And I promise, I would be a great thing. Whatever thing you assign me. The best chair. The finest book. Better than a Corbusier if you want me to. Just pick for me. Free me from the madness of choosing.

But no. You still want me to suffer one last time. You insist I choose for myself. One last act of agency, of so-called freedom, before the transformation. Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll choose.

A dartboard. Perfectly round, not circular but flat, waiting. My purpose would be clear: to catch every dart life throws. Again and again, silently. Whether I am cheap cork or expensive fiber, I will stay still, make no noise, catch the dart and be ready for the next until life hits its target.

But I’m lying. I would never choose to be a dartboard, or a dart. I would choose to be a mesh. Thin, tightly woven, stretched with quiet strength. My threads would allow the small things—rain, dust, pebbles—to slip through. I wouldn’t cling to them, just let them pass. The big things might stay, that’s fine. Every thread counts. Every touch would leave a trace. And when something larger pressed, my wires would stretch, make room, adapt. I wouldn’t absorb, but I wouldn’t resist either. Passage would be my wisdom.

And still, I worry. What if I became a thing but still ended up without purpose? What if I was misused, misunderstood, ignored by the very people meant to fulfill me? Karma, perhaps, turning me into a thing owned by someone like me—someone who respects humans but not things.

Because I don’t respect things. Not really. Not even the ones that try to serve me quietly. I use the floor as a closet, the closet as storage for everything but clothes. I work from the bed and sleep at the desk. The dinner table is a landfill of keys, books, remotes, forgotten lists. I wear a watch, not to tell time but to perform status, as jewelry. I use a pencil to pretend I’m smoking. I hold a cigarette, not to smoke, but to provoke my husband, who hates smokers and judges them harshly. I want to smoke in his mind, but not in my lungs. I misuse, I reassign, I collapse purposes. Constantly. Maybe I even take secret joy in it.

But if I became a thing, I would want him to be my owner. He respects things with a precision that borders on sacred. Too much, in my opinion, but maybe that’s what a thing would need. Sometimes I even get jealous—not of women, never women—but of objects. He never calls a woman beautiful. But a woman turned into a thing—Nefertiti, Mona Lisa, a sculpture, a portrait—that, he finds beautiful.

I violate abstract things too. I use vacation to work. Work hours to read fiction. Writing time to therapize myself. I repurpose time as I repurpose objects. I collapse all intentions. Maybe that’s how I lost my purpose in the first place.

Maybe if I respected the pencil, the pencil would write for me. If I respected the desk, it would give me inspiration. If I respected the table, my appetite would return. If I respected the bed, my sleep would regulate. If I respected the couch, it would let me rest. Maybe I am the source of the trouble, and maybe I can fix it.

But even if I tried—even if I learned reverence—I still worry I would circle back here again. Because the body always leads, and the mind always lags behind. The habits, rituals, meals, duties—they keep marching. They don’t wait for thought. They never stop to let the mind catch up. And only when the body takes a break does the mind arrive, panting and exhausted, too late to matter.

Maybe Camus was right: we get into the habit of living before we get into the habit of thinking. And the body always keeps the lead. If that’s the case, then yes, I’d rather be a thing.

But not just any thing. Never the overdesigned, plastic, indestructible thing. That terrifies me. To linger after my usefulness ends. To sit in a landfill for centuries, incapable of decay. Thousands of micro-materials stitched together, refusing even fire. To be denied death.

If I must be a thing, let me be simple. A wooden chair. A bit of fabric, a few nails, nothing more. Enough to serve, enough to die. Let the wood rot, the fabric fade, the copper rust. Three deaths are enough. Thousands are too many.

Think about the last time you had a toothache. Remember the throbbing pain, how it consumed your thoughts, made it hard to focus on anything else? Now imagine facing that pain regularly, with no end in sight, because you can’t afford to see a dentist, and because you had such terrible oral care growing up.

This isn’t just about discomfort. It’s about missed opportunities, lost potential, and a cycle of poverty that is hard to break.

Imagine a bright student growing up in the urban poor neighborhoods of Rabat. She is trying to climb the social ladder. Education is her ticket upward. She has prepared for weeks for a crucial presentation. But the night before, a neglected cavity flares up. The pain is so intense she can’t sleep. She misses the presentation, fails the assignment. Her professor, unaware of her struggles, marks her as unreliable.

Now consider another young man with somewhat a similar background who has finally landed a job interview after months of searching. But that morning, the molar he’s been ignoring for months decides to rebel. His face swells. He can barely speak. He misses the interview, loses the opportunity.

Think of a mother who has learned to smile with her mouth closed, who speaks from behind a hand, who laughs without sound. When social occasions demand it, she dons a set of ill-fitting dentures, enduring pain and discomfort rather than reveal the truth of her bare gums, hardened by years of toothlessness.

I was that girl, I was that young man, and that was my mom in many instances.

These aren’t isolated incidents. Across Morocco, across the world, people in poverty face these challenges daily. It’s not just about how teeth look, though that matters too. It’s about the constant, grinding pain that makes it hard to focus, to learn, to work.

This is the true face of inequality. It’s not just about who can afford a vacation or who speaks French or can have a roof that is not made of iron. It’s about who can afford to smile without shame, to speak without fear, to eat without pain.

The issue isn’t just about access to dental care, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s about a system that allows such stark inequality to exist in the first place. It’s about a society that claims to value merit and hard work, yet unconsciously discriminates based on something as arbitrary as dental aesthetics.

Many things can get in the way of advancing out of poverty, but there is one unspoken barrier that can do lifelong damage: bad teeth. Think about it. How many job interviews are won or lost based on that crucial first impression, that moment when a smile (or lack thereof) can make all the difference? How many potential relationships, professional or personal, are nipped in the bud because someone is too ashamed to open their mouth?

Bad teeth get in the way of everything. This is the dirty secret of poverty, the unspoken inequality that we all see but rarely acknowledge. It’s the kind of disadvantage that compounds upon itself, creating a vicious cycle that’s nearly impossible to break.

And here’s the kicker: unlike many other aspects of poverty, this one is immediately visible. You can hide the fact that you don’t own a car. You can obfuscate your lack of a college degree. But your teeth? They’re right there, front and center, broadcasting your economic status to the world with every word you speak, every laugh you stifle.

In countries like Morocco, where dental care isn’t universally accessible, the problem is even more acute. A 2019 study found that over 80% of Moroccan children had untreated dental caries. This isn’t just a health issue—it’s an education issue, an employment issue, a social mobility issue.

Even those who manage to climb the economic ladder through education often carry the legacy of poor dental health. They might have the degree, the skills, but a mouth full of pain or missing teeth can still hold them back.

Compare this to middle-class peers. They’re not immune to dental issues, but they have options. A toothache? They see a dentist. Need braces? It’s a hassle, but manageable. They don’t face the same barriers in school or work.

This disparity starts young. A teenager from a poor family might skip school because of dental pain, falling behind in classes. Their middle-class classmate gets the needed treatment and stays on track.

As adults, the gap widens. A middle-class worker with a toothache takes a sick day, sees a dentist, returns to work. A worker in poverty might lose their job because they can’t afford to miss a day, let alone pay for treatment.

This isn’t just about individual choices. It’s about a system that allows such basic health needs to go unmet. It’s about the hidden costs of poverty that compound over time.

We need to recognize dental health as a crucial factor in breaking the cycle of poverty. It’s not just about having a nice smile—it’s about having the chance to fully participate in society, to learn without distraction, to work without constant pain.

The next time you see someone with less-than-perfect teeth, remember: you’re not just seeing bad dental hygiene. You might be seeing the face of systemic inequality, of missed opportunities, of potential unfulfilled.

Morocco is a place with a complex identity. I will start from where we all started in our early classes of history and geography. The classic famous statement we all learned by heart: “Morocco is characterized by its strategic geographical position.” We have the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Then we have the imposing mountains, the most significant in North Africa. Forests blanket these mountains, also among the most extensive in North Africa. There are vast plains and an expansive desert.

When a land is this diverse, it naturally leads to a rich history. Various peoples migrated to Morocco over millennia. It has always been a confluence of different races, civilizations, philosophies, and cultures. It is and has always been a nation of many facets.

The oldest human remains in Africa were discovered in Morocco, at Jebel Irhoud. This long history fostered Moroccans’ openness to the world. If you ask me about the defining aspect of this identity, it would be this openness to the world.

We occupy a crucial position in the world. We overlook the Strait of Gibraltar. The entire Mediterranean Sea has its entrance here. We’re in close proximity to Europe, just 14 km away. We’re also near Subsaharan Africa. The Atlantic used to be the end of the world, and when the other side was discovered, Morocco was one of the gates to it. Consequently, Morocco has always been a crossroads for different cultures.

That’s why some of the most renowned travelers in the Arab world were Moroccan, like Ibn Battuta and others. This capacity to explore new territories and comprehend other peoples is inherently Moroccan. So, in a way, accepting the other is part of who we are. Accepting difference is part of ethnicity and identity. More than accepting the other, we seek the other.

Moroccans have always felt safe in their otherness. In fact, Moroccan civilization wasn’t shaped by the sea. This is one of the few points where I don’t agree with Abdellah Laroui, one of the great Moroccan thinkers. Laroui says that Morocco is an island and thus we need to think like islanders. But we are not islanders. We are mountain people. The Amazigh, indigenous population of Morocco, traditionally viewed the sea as a source of potential threats, so they got away from it. They recognized their true homeland was in the mountains. The mountains not only shielded Morocco from desertification but also from invaders. It was extremely challenging with ancient warfare technology to traverse the Atlas Mountains. Thus, Morocco possessed a natural barrier that made its people feel safe.

The Greeks looked at the Atlas mountains carrying the beautiful clouds on their shoulders and named their god after them. The Arabs led by Okba Ibn Nafii were never able to conquer from the mountains, but the Mediterranean Sea gave them room to enter. Among the whole Arabized world, Morocco was able to keep its Amazigh identity, thanks to the mountains. Similarly, the Ottoman Empire subdued all other Arab countries and could not get beyond the Atlas mountains. The mountains didn’t merely protect Morocco from invasion. They also preserved the Moroccan identity, with all its core elements.

The essence of Morocco’s culture lies in the mountains. Moroccan culture is fundamentally a mountain culture. The mountain is in our culinary tools, our tajine shape, our belgha, our jewelry. Even the way we present couscous carries the mountain’s imprint. The Moroccan imagination has always featured the mountain prominently. Moroccan qualities are deeply associated with mountains—courage, wisdom, generosity—these are all quintessentially Moroccan traits.

That feeling of safety in our mountains made us comfortable with the other. It made us feel safe and thus accepting.

Then came the day we left the mountain for the urban plain fields—not to say the word “city,” because we do not yet have a city. This might come out as a strong statement, but we have never truly had a city. These are not my words; these are the convincing words of one of the most intelligent Moroccan and Arab novelists today.

Some might accuse Abdelkrim Jouti that this view has a touch of Orientalism or bias. But if you contemplate his statement and his follow-up explanation, he is talking about the modern concept of a city. A true modern city is a transition from the farmer’s time to the merchant’s time. That’s why in London, you find clocks—the merchant’s time is about producing money. The farmer’s time revolves around the annual cycle of sowing seeds. In Morocco, until I left in 2015, people were still using prayer times, which are very much aligned with the sun, in commerce and even in public administration offices. You cannot question why a public officer is not in his office if it is said that he went to pray. And I am using his here and not being gender neutral because only men take advantage of such an archaic way to get out of public duty.

In a modern city, we move from tribal relationships to neighborhood and citizenship, from blood ties to spatial proximity and civic bonds. We shift from religious institutions to the public square. Cities are inherently squares and markets for exchange and commerce of goods and ideas. Greek philosophy was developed in the agoras of Athens. The French Revolution happened in squares. Without cities and squares, the French Revolution couldn’t have unfolded as it did.

In Arab cities, we have squares in Rabat, Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and so on. The Egyptians took over Tahrir Square during what was called the Arab Spring in 2011. But the square was hijacked by political and ideological Islamist projects. They hijack the squares, hijack the streets for prayer, hijack public duty. You can pray in the city, but you cannot obstruct traffic. You can pray on time, but any citizen needs to find a public officer on duty when needed for a document. Obstructing traffic isn’t urban or civil behavior. Not having access to administrative service unmakes us as a city. It means we have cities that don’t fulfill the function of a city as cities have done historically.

So we left the mountains seeking the non-existing city, and we got lost. We got stunted in our development. We ended up with a flawed modernity, oscillating between our traditional structures and our inability to courageously enter modern society with all that it demands in terms of values of individualism, rationality, productivity, and so on.

We have this great inability to shed the remnants of the past, but we are not embracing the greatness of our past either. We are societies where the past always triumphs, but merely in our dreams. Whenever we feel we are on the verge of a real breakthrough towards progress, we take a step back.

We renovate in architecture, we renew the tools we use, but we haven’t yet been able to face the real change that occurs in values and ideas. Belonging to the modern world isn’t about using tools. Belonging to the modern world is about embracing its values—collectivism, individualism, productivity, and social responsibility. We are societies of rent seeking, dependency, and fatalism that still believe in magical or mythical powers. We brought our mountain habits and we lost our way to use them in modern society. Instead of using the myth to accept our difference and our multiple truths, we used it to spread fear. Myth used as a tool for ideology could be even worse than extreme ideology.

We cannot progress—and here’s the historicity—unless we adopt the path taken by advanced nations: that is, adopting freedom and making individuals responsible for their actions. Giving agency and carrying its weight.

I sat next to two Moroccans on the plane home. This trip was different—my first time returning for work, paid by a Moroccan university. I felt proud. From my aisle seat, I watched them settle in. They spoke French the entire flight, dropping maybe three or four words of darija, no more. Good neighbors though. Slept most of the way, didn’t constantly need the bathroom. Perfect.

When we landed, the plane was trashed. Worse than usual—and it’s always bad when people deplane—but this exceeded what I’d see on Delta or Air France. The two started talking, called Moroccan people “savages.” Asked each other: “How are we ever going to advance with these savages?”

I felt deeply offended. I belong more to those they called savages than to these French-speaking Moroccans. But I was also offended by my own people leaving such a mess.

Waiting for luggage, I kept thinking about it. Yes, the “savages” could’ve done better. But the service was terrible. The stewards never collected trash—twice I walked to the back to throw mine away after waiting forever. On other airlines, they’re constantly circling with trash bags. Plus, Moroccan airlines carry more kids than any airline I know. Toddlers make messes, especially when a mother’s traveling alone with two or three of them. I wasn’t justifying anything. I was trying to understand what needs to change so we won’t be called savages—so our country can supposedly advance once we stop our savagery.

My luggage arrived, coincidentally at the same time as the young Moroccan guy and his girlfriend—the same two from the plane. We all headed to the pickup area. Another source of pride: being collected in a black car with curtains by a suited driver. When I’d checked his WhatsApp profile earlier, I’d seen his professional photo—same black car, same suit, standing by parliament. A driver for officials.

The girlfriend’s driver waited farther down. The guy and I greeted our drivers, cars side by side. His driver also wore a suit, also drove a government car. The guy himself was a kid—couldn’t be over twenty-two. Clearly using daddy’s government resources—the official car, the official driver, all of it.

Then the cherry on top: he grabbed his luggage and left his cart in the middle of the road. Didn’t return it to its designated space. Just got in and drove off.

I said to myself: “How are we ever going to advance with these predators?”

I don’t want to generalize, but at least for me and most of my entourage, whether they realized it or not, we are somewhat conditioned to equate success with acquisition. We say material things don’t matter but in one way or another we chase them. But then when we see the line at the mall snaked around the corner, and spot that guy with scuffed shoes, worn jeans, practically vibrating with excitement as he tells his friend “Man, I’ve been saving for months for these. You don’t even know how many extra shifts I picked up,” we roll eyes even if we don’t visibly do it. And a little voice in our head wants to tell that guy, “Man! Get your priorities straight.” So aren’t we the same?

Maybe we are not, because once in a while we decide to “go minimalist.” Maybe we will even ditch most of our possessions. Even better, we could donate them. It feels enlightening, liberating even. But at the end of the day, we know what we are giving up. We have tasted its luxury and decided it wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Meanwhile, the poor kid is busting their ass, dreaming of that sneaker, of the stuff you donated, having spent their whole life believing that stuff would make them happy.

It’s easy to say “material things don’t matter” when you’ve had them. It’s like a full person telling a starving one that food isn’t that important.

But here’s the trap—if we decide we need all this stuff to be happy, we’re setting ourselves up for misery. Either we can’t get it, or we spend our lives in constant fear of losing it. It’s a hamster wheel of anxiety, and we’re all running our little hearts out.

Here’s a thought that’ll keep you up at night—losing everything might be better than losing half. At least then you’re free. Because the opposite of being a slave isn’t being free, it’s being a master. And masters are just as chained as slaves, just with nicer-looking shackles.

You want to know what’s really interesting about people? It’s not what they show off on their dating profiles or flaunt on LinkedIn and Instagram. It is what they don’t show about themselves. That’s where the real story is. It’s the hidden depths, the quiet struggles, and the unspoken dreams that truly define a person’s character and shape their journey through life. These concealed aspects often reveal more about an individual’s authentic self than any carefully curated public image ever could.

The person showing weakness is strong, the one showing strength is weak. The one showing off knowledge is deeply ignorant. The loudest voices are the least informed. The ones showing coldness and distance are the most empathetic. The ones constantly busy are the least productive. The ones appearing most confident are often plagued by self-doubt. Those who seem to have it all figured out are usually the most lost. You pick your paradox and go watch it live in a post or a story, but you will have to read between the lines and watch behind the background. The most important parts of a person’s story are written in invisible ink.

That’s why, in the end, trying to truly understand others is often a fool’s errand. People are walking contradictions, layers upon layers of masks they cannot figure out how to take off for their own sake. The energy spent decoding these enigmas could be better invested in yourself. That’s such a BS cliché. Even you are too wrapped up in your own deceptions to even recognize the lies you tell yourself, let alone unravel the mysteries of others. Do you now feel paralyzed? I can’t figure out others. I can’t figure out myself. What the heck do I do?

Perhaps the real question isn’t about understanding others or yourself, but about embracing the chaos and contradiction inherent in human nature and finding beauty in the unresolved mysteries of existence. Sorry, another bluff? Did you really believe me this time? If yes, well, you should check your BS detector. Because all I said is fluff. Nothing I said really makes sense here.

But now here is the truth: after all, you are asking all the wrong questions. The real power lies not in understanding, but in creating—in authoring your own narrative and shaping the world around you, regardless of whether you’ve deciphered every hidden motive or unmasked every deception. How did I do this time? I think your detector has now improved and you have truly furrowed your brows in concentration. Great, that’s our first step, because no one is interesting, and when one is, it’s temporary and relative.

ذو العقل يشقى في النعيم بعقله
The one with a mind suffers, even in bliss, because of his mind. — al-Mutanabbi

If the choice were between the torment of knowledge and the comforting lull of ignorance, I would choose the torment every single time.

A torment that dulls the blows of future traumas, that teaches you to brace for what’s to come, making you stronger. And yes, the pain is real, but it’s something you can carry—provided you don’t let it overtake you. It’s a form of discipline, a deliberate surrender to suffering, balanced by rare moments of unclouded joy—just enough to remind you of what lies beneath the burden.

Ignorance, however, is nothing more than a narcotic. You wake from it to find you’re still trapped in its haze, paying the price for your denial of what was so clearly there, because you chose to live in the false peace of unawareness.

The phrase “What you don’t know won’t hurt you” is a lie, one that whispers sweet assurances even as it leads you to ruin. What you don’t know doesn’t just sit idle—it waits in the wings, ready to shatter you with no warning, leaving you defenseless against what you failed to see coming.

Freedom creates beauty. Not just any beauty—the real kind. The kind that doesn’t ask for permission. The kind that erupts, wild and alive, from the absence of restraint. That’s the idea I can’t shake. Strip away the rules, the expectations, the plans—and something authentic, maybe even sublime, is allowed to emerge.

But then I look at dance. Ballet. Flamenco. Even hip-hop battles. And I can’t ignore the contradiction: some of the most breathtaking beauty in human history was designed. Choreographed. Locked in step-by-step instruction. These dancers aren’t improvising—they’re submitting to precision. Discipline. Rehearsed perfection. And it kills the idea that freedom is the only road to beauty. How can something so rigid produce something so alive? An ultimate form of beauty, even.

Maybe freedom isn’t in the steps. It’s in the fire behind them. Two dancers can perform the exact same routine and leave you with entirely different experiences. Same structure, different soul. That difference. That’s the freedom. Not in what they do, but in how they do it.

The choreographer writes the sentence. The dancer decides the tone. The volume. The pause. The look that follows. That’s not obedience. That’s authorship. Real freedom doesn’t always mean breaking the form. Sometimes it’s owning it so completely that it becomes an extension of who you are.

That said, I still think TEDx is stupid.

Looking for or believing in signs from the universe is the biggest delusion. Worse than hope, the worst drug. Do you really believe that our actions are important enough to deserve to be written in the great book of the universe? You really believe that those gigantic or little and luminous bodies rolling above our heads exist to announce to us our possible future?

Nature lets, sometimes even leads, the lost self into superstition. All of it moves, randomly and continuously. But some parts of nature move randomly more often than others. The ocean waves, the trees, the roses, the wind, the sun, the clouds—they’re always shifting. Always in motion. It can come and go, move left or right, be subtle or loud, invisible or dramatic. And in that randomness, it gives you just enough room to guess. To anticipate. To assign meaning.

Sometimes it’s just play. Other times, mostly when you are lost, you start seeing these movements as signs. As messages. That’s how nature turns us into superstitious creatures, waiting on the universe to speak through a branch swaying or a bird cutting across the sky. Like the universe would really care about what we’re longing for. About all our messy, desperate expectations. Like it would start throwing clues at us through its winds and shadows, through petals falling or clouds parting just so.

But not all of nature plays this game.

Mountains, for example, demand something different. They impose respect. They move too, yes—they shift, they even rumble—but not in a timeframe that fits neatly inside a single human life. A volcano might wake. Or it might not. And any prediction takes decades. Centuries, even. Mountains don’t entertain superstition. They don’t humor your longing for signs. You can’t read them like you do waves or leaves. You just stare at them. And they stare back. Silent, immovable, ancient. They don’t offer signs; they demand reverence. And that’s why I love mountains. If I ever get to be a nature thing, I would want to be a mountain.

Drink eight glasses of water daily and make sure they’re spaced evenly throughout the day; intermittent fasting improves longevity but only if you fast for sixteen hours and eat within an eight-hour window; sleep exactly seven to nine hours because less causes cognitive decline and more is associated with depression; don’t drink coffee after 2pm unless you’re a slow metabolizer of caffeine then you shouldn’t drink it after noon; exercise for 150 minutes of moderate activity per week or 75 minutes of vigorous activity; is it true that you’re still eating carbs after 6pm?; strength train at least twice weekly to prevent sarcopenia but rest 48 hours between sessions targeting the same muscle groups; meditate for 10 minutes daily because it reduces cortical thickness decline; don’t look at screens two hours before bed because blue light suppresses melatonin; on Sundays try to walk 10,000 steps and not like the sedentary person you are so bent on becoming; take Vitamin D supplements if you live above 37 degrees latitude; don’t take Vitamin D supplements without also taking Vitamin K2; probiotics will follow you but I don’t take probiotics on Sundays at all and never with antibiotics; this is how to optimize your gut microbiome; this is how to maintain telomere length; this is how to reduce inflammation markers; always eat your vegetables in such a way that you consume 30 different plant species per week; don’t eat vegetables that are nightshades if you have inflammation; is it true that you eat processed foods?; you mustn’t eat sugar, not even natural sugars if you want to prevent insulin resistance; don’t eat fruits on an empty stomach because the fructose; this is how you sweep cortisol from your system—with adaptogens taken at specific times; this is how you balance your hormones; this is how you optimize your circadian rhythm by viewing sunlight within 30 minutes of waking; this is how you activate your parasympathetic nervous system; this is how you build cognitive reserve; this is how you prevent neurodegeneration; learn a new language to build grey matter but only if you practice daily and achieve conversational fluency; play a musical instrument for neuroplasticity but only if you start before age seven for maximum benefit although adult learning still shows measurable changes in brain structure; do high-intensity interval training because it increases VO2 max more efficiently than steady-state cardio; don’t do high-intensity interval training more than three times per week because overtraining increases cortisol; track your heart rate variability as a biomarker of recovery; cold plunge for 11 minutes total per week distributed across multiple sessions to increase brown fat and norepinephrine; don’t cold plunge before strength training because it may blunt hypertrophic adaptations; heat exposure through sauna at 80-100 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes four times per week reduces all-cause mortality; stand while working to reduce sitting time associated with metabolic syndrome; don’t stand for more than 30 minutes without movement because prolonged standing increases cardiovascular risk; make sure your desk is at exactly elbow height when standing; this is how to prevent forward head posture from screen time; this is how to maintain proper spinal alignment; consume 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight daily or is it 1.6 grams per kilogram if you’re trying to build muscle or 2.2 grams if you’re over 65 to prevent muscle wasting; eat breakfast within an hour of waking to optimize metabolic function; don’t eat breakfast because time-restricted eating improves insulin sensitivity; this is how you smile to activate your vagus nerve and reduce stress even if you don’t feel like smiling; this is how you smile at someone you don’t like because positive affect is contagious and benefits both parties; this is how you smile at someone you like completely and authentically because genuine Duchenne smiles engage the orbicularis oculi muscle; practice gratitude journaling for three things daily because it rewires neural pathways toward positive bias; don’t practice toxic positivity because emotional suppression is associated with worse health outcomes; this is how you set boundaries to protect your mental health; this is how to be vulnerable in relationships because Brené Brown’s research shows vulnerability correlates with connection; this is how you attach securely; this is how you recognize your attachment style which was formed before age three and influences all your relationships; don’t catastrophize because cognitive distortions maintain anxiety; challenge your automatic thoughts with cognitive restructuring; this is how you develop a growth mindset; believe you can improve through effort because mindset affects outcomes; don’t believe in yourself too much because overconfidence leads to the Dunning-Kruger effect; be gritty and develop passion and perseverance for long-term goals; take breaks because deliberate rest improves performance; work in 90-minute ultradian cycles followed by 20-minute breaks; use the Pomodoro Technique of 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off; deep work requires four hours of uninterrupted focus; don’t work more than four hours of deep work because productivity declines and you’ll burn out; manage your energy not your time; manage your time not your energy; batch similar tasks together; single-task because multitasking reduces productivity by 40%; drink coffee to improve focus because caffeine blocks adenosine receptors; don’t drink coffee because it increases anxiety and disrupts sleep architecture even if consumed six hours before bed; this is how to optimize your workspace with plants because they improve air quality and cognitive function by 15%; this is how to maintain optimal temperature of 20-22 degrees Celsius for productivity; exposure to natural light increases serotonin; don’t get too much sun exposure because UV radiation causes DNA damage and premature aging; wear SPF 30 daily even indoors because windows don’t block UVA rays; this is how to prevent premature skin aging with retinoids; use Vitamin C serum in the morning; use retinol at night; don’t use retinol and acids together; this is the correct order to apply your skincare; be sure to wash every day even if it is with your own spit because maintaining your microbiome; don’t squat down to tie your shoes—you are not inflexible, you know; practice yoga for flexibility and stress reduction; don’t practice yoga if you’re hypermobile because you need strength training not more flexibility; this is how you prevent osteoporosis with weight-bearing exercise; this is how you prevent sarcopenia; this is how you prevent cognitive decline; this is how you prevent cardiovascular disease with omega-3 fatty acids; this is how you prevent cancer—but which cancer because the research varies by cancer type and genetic factors and environmental exposures; eat cruciferous vegetables; don’t eat cruciferous vegetables if you have thyroid issues; this is how to reduce oxidative stress with antioxidants; don’t take antioxidant supplements because they may blunt the beneficial stress response from exercise; this is how to activate autophagy through fasting; this is how to boost NAD+ levels; this is how to activate AMPK; this is how to inhibit mTOR except when you want to build muscle then you need to activate mTOR; take fish oil; don’t take fish oil because most supplements are oxidized and rancid; eat fish; don’t eat fish because of mercury and microplastics; this is how to optimize your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio; limit alcohol to no more than one drink per day for women and two for men; don’t drink any alcohol because no amount is safe according to the latest research; moderate alcohol consumption is associated with longevity in Blue Zones; correlation does not imply causation and those studies don’t control for socioeconomic status and social connection; this is how you maintain social connections because loneliness is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes per day; this is how you curate your social network because you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with; don’t spend time with negative people; practice compassion for all people; set boundaries with toxic people; everyone is doing their best; hold people accountable; this is how to communicate nonviolently using I-statements; this is how to listen actively with full presence; put your phone away during conversations because even its presence reduces connection quality; don’t check your phone first thing in the morning because it activates stress response; check your phone to stay connected because social connection is protective; limit social media to 30 minutes per day; use social media mindfully; delete social media because it’s associated with depression and anxiety and reduced attention span; the correlation between social media and mental health is complex and bidirectional; this is how you build resilience; this is how you develop emotional intelligence; this is how you regulate your nervous system; this is how you process trauma with EMDR or somatic experiencing or cognitive behavioral therapy or internal family systems depending on which research you read and which symptoms you have and which therapeutic relationship you form; take psychiatric medication if you need it because mental illness has biological components; don’t take psychiatric medication because side effects; therapy is just as effective as medication for mild to moderate depression; medication plus therapy is more effective than either alone; this is how to make a good first impression because you only get one chance and people form judgments in seven seconds; don’t worry about first impressions because people’s opinions change with more information; this is how you build habits by making them obvious attractive easy and satisfying; break bad habits by making them invisible unattractive difficult and unsatisfying; habits take 21 days to form or is it 66 days; willpower is a limited resource that depletes; willpower is not limited if you believe it’s not limited because beliefs shape reality; this is how you make decisions by using a decision matrix; trust your gut because intuition draws on accumulated experience; don’t trust your gut because you’re subject to cognitive biases like confirmation bias and availability heuristic and anchoring and recency bias; use System 2 thinking; trust System 1 for pattern recognition; we’re all overconfident; practice metacognition; be present; plan for the future; learn from the past; don’t ruminate about the past; practice mindfulness; set goals using SMART criteria; don’t set goals because they create a continuous state of failure until achieved; focus on systems not goals; focus on goals not systems; visualize success; don’t just visualize because mental contrasting is more effective; this is how to manage stress with box breathing; this is how to activate your relaxation response; chronic stress causes telomere shortening and hippocampal atrophy and increased allostatic load; some stress is beneficial and necessary for growth—hormesis; this is how you differentiate eustress from distress; this is how you build distress tolerance; this is how you sit with discomfort; this is how you avoid discomfort that’s genuinely harmful; trust yourself; get a second opinion; be confident; stay humble; the Dunning-Kruger effect means incompetent people are overconfident; imposter syndrome means competent people feel like frauds; you probably have imposter syndrome unless you have Dunning-Kruger; this is how you know the difference; this is how you develop self-awareness through journaling; this is how you examine your life because the unexamined life is not worth living but also analysis paralysis; this is how you take action despite uncertainty; this is how you tolerate ambiguity; this is how you make peace with paradox; read books; listen to podcasts; take courses; be a lifelong learner; don’t consume too much information because information overload impairs decision-making; curate your inputs; diversify your sources; be careful of filter bubbles; seek disconfirming evidence; steel-man opposing arguments; be intellectually humble; have strong opinions weakly held; change your mind when evidence changes; don’t be wishy-washy; stand for something; question everything; don’t be so skeptical you can’t accept anything; this is how to think critically; this is how to think creatively; divergent thinking then convergent thinking; brainstorm without judgment then evaluate; sleep on decisions because sleep consolidates learning and provides insight; decide quickly because analysis paralysis; trust the process; control what you can control; accept what you cannot change; this is how to develop equanimity; this is how to cultivate inner peace; but what if inner peace won’t come when you follow all these rules?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of person for whom nothing is ever enough, who can never optimize enough, who carries the weight of every study ever published like stones in your pockets, who has turned living into a performance of living, who believes that health is something earned through perfect compliance rather than a dynamic state that includes disease and recovery and mystery and luck and genetics you didn’t choose and environments you can’t control and the stubborn fact that bodies are not machines and research is not prescription and correlation is not causation and P<0.05 doesn’t mean what you think it means and confidence intervals are wide and effect sizes are often small and populations are not individuals and what works on average doesn’t work for everyone and science is a process not a product and uncertainty is the only honest answer to most questions about how to live?

Here’s what happened: A mouse ate blueberries for six weeks and didn’t get dementia.

The mouse was white. The mouse was male. The mouse was eight weeks old when the study started. The mouse lived in a cage in a temperature-controlled room in a laboratory in California. The mouse had never had a job. The mouse had never been stressed about paying rent. The mouse had never doomscrolled at 2am. The mouse had never been to a birthday party where someone brought a cake and everyone sang off-key and the mouse felt obligated to eat a slice even though it was trying to eat clean. The mouse had never experienced discrimination. The mouse had never been in love. The mouse had never been heartbroken. The mouse had never worried about climate change. The mouse had seventeen siblings in the study and they all got the same carefully measured dose of blueberry extract mixed into pellets that cost more per gram than your dinner.

You are not the mouse.

But here’s what you saw: “STUDY SHOWS BLUEBERRIES PREVENT ALZHEIMER’S.”

You didn’t see: “Blueberry Extract at Doses Equivalent to 2.5 Cups of Blueberries Daily Showed Reduced Beta-Amyloid Plaque Formation in the Hippocampus of Eight-Week-Old Male C57BL/6J Mice Over a Six-Week Period Compared to Control Mice Fed Standard Chow, Though Researchers Note Results May Not Translate to Humans and Long-term Effects Unknown.”

That headline is too long. Nobody would click it. Nobody would share it. Nobody would buy blueberries.

So you bought blueberries.

You bought so many blueberries. Organic ones, because you also saw something about pesticides and bees. You put them in your smoothie and your oatmeal and you ate them by the handful standing in front of your fridge, and you felt virtuous and you felt like you were doing something, like you were fighting back against the inevitable decay of your own brain, like those little blue orbs had magical properties, like you had knowledge and control.

The blueberry farms expanded. The headlines multiplied. “Blueberries: A Superfood for Your Brain!” “Why You Should Eat Blueberries Every Day.” “The One Food That Prevents Memory Loss.”

Nobody told you that the study had eighteen mice. Total. Nine ate blueberries, nine didn’t. Nobody told you that the mice were sacrificed at fourteen weeks old—which in mouse years is like late adolescence—so nobody actually knows if they would have gotten dementia anyway, because mice that age don’t get dementia. Nobody told you that mice aren’t little humans in fur coats. Nobody told you that the dose they gave the mice, adjusted for body weight, meant you’d need to eat about three pounds of blueberries every single day. Nobody told you that the study was funded by the North American Blueberry Council.

But let’s say you ate your blueberries every day for thirty years and you still got Alzheimer’s. Would you feel betrayed? Would you wonder what went wrong? Would you think maybe you didn’t eat enough? Would you wish you’d eaten strawberries instead? Would you remember the mouse?

The mouse is dead now. The mouse has been dead for years. The mouse died for your clicks.

Here’s another thing that happened: A group of college students in Ohio took a memory test, then half of them were told they did great and half were told they did poorly. Then they all took the test again. The ones who were told they did great did better the second time. The ones who were told they did poorly did worse. The researchers called this “stereotype threat” or “self-fulfilling prophecy” or “the power of mindset,” depending on which framework they were using.

The students were 19 years old. They were psychology majors. They were 73% white. They were getting course credit for participation. They were sitting in a windowless room in the basement of the psychology building on a Tuesday afternoon. They had nothing to gain and nothing to lose. The test was meaningless. Their lives would continue exactly the same regardless of their score.

You are not those students.

But here’s what you learned: Your mindset determines your outcomes. Believe you can and you will. Thoughts become things. You are what you think.

So you worked on your mindset. You read the books. You listened to the podcasts. You made vision boards. You said affirmations in the mirror. You believed so hard your jaw hurt.

And maybe it worked. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe something good happened and you attributed it to your mindset, and something bad happened and you wondered what negative thought you’d been harboring unconsciously. Maybe you got tired. Maybe you decided mindset was bullshit. Maybe you decided you just weren’t doing it right.

Nobody told you that beliefs don’t cure cancer. Nobody told you that positive thinking doesn’t pay bills. Nobody told you that those students were playing a game with no stakes and you are living a life where things actually matter. Nobody told you that the replication rate in psychology is about 50%, which means half the studies that made headlines couldn’t be reproduced when other researchers tried. Nobody told you that the researchers themselves put a paragraph at the end of the paper—the part nobody reads—saying “results may not generalize beyond college student populations” and “further research needed” and “limitations include small sample size and lack of real-world consequences.”

But you already changed your whole personality based on that study. You already judged yourself for not believing hard enough. You already bought the journal and the course and the premium meditation app subscription.

Here’s what else happened: Somebody measured something. They measured it carefully. They measured it in a controlled environment. They measured it seventeen times. They did statistics. They found a difference between Group A and Group B. The difference was real. The difference was statistically significant. The difference was P<0.05, which means if there were no real difference, there would be less than a 5% chance of seeing a difference this big just by random luck.

The difference was also three minutes.

Group A slept an average of 7 hours and 32 minutes. Group B slept an average of 7 hours and 29 minutes. The difference was statistically significant. The difference was real. The difference was meaningless.

But you didn’t hear about the three minutes. You heard: “STUDY PROVES OPTIMAL SLEEP DURATION.”

You set your alarm accordingly. You track it on your watch. You optimize. You worry when you miss the target. You have created a whole infrastructure of anxiety around three minutes that nobody in the study could even feel.

This is what we do. We take a finding—a tiny, fragile, preliminary finding from a specific population in a specific context under specific conditions—and we build a cathedral around it. We make it a rule. We make it a routine. We make it an identity. We make it a business. We make it a religion.

The mouse ate the blueberries and didn’t get dementia, and we all changed our grocery lists.

The college students were told they did well and they did better, and we all changed our thoughts.

Somebody slept three more minutes, and we all changed our alarms.

And nobody—not the researchers, not the journalists, not the influencers, not the companies selling you solutions—nobody told you the most important thing:

The map is not the territory.

The finding is not the truth.

The average is not you.

The mouse is dead and you are alive, and those are not the same thing.

Let’s face it: the world isn’t black and white. It’s a messy, colorful chaos. But that doesn’t mean truth doesn’t exist. It just means truth is often more complex than we’d like.

Imagine you’re looking at an elephant. You’re standing in front, staring at its trunk. Your friend is behind, looking at its tail. Another pal is on the side, seeing its massive body. You’re all describing the same elephant, but your descriptions differ wildly. Are you all wrong? No. Are you all completely right? Also no.

This is the essence of multiple perspectives coexisting. It’s not about saying, “Hey, your truth is yours, my truth is mine, and they’re both equally valid no matter what.” That’s nonsense. It’s about recognizing that our view of reality is often incomplete.

Here’s the kicker: acknowledging multiple perspectives doesn’t mean embracing wishy-washy relativism. It means being humble enough to admit we might not have the full picture. It’s about being antifragile in our thinking.

Take religion, for example. A Christian might say, “Jesus is the son of God.” A Muslim might say, “Muhammad is the final prophet.” An atheist might say, “There is no God.” These claims can’t all be true in an absolute sense. They contradict each other. But each perspective might offer valuable insights about human nature, morality, or the search for meaning.

The robust thinker doesn’t say, “All these views are equally true.” Instead, they ask, “What can I learn from each perspective? How might my own view be incomplete?”

This approach isn’t about watering down truth. It’s about strengthening our understanding by exposing it to different viewpoints. It’s like building a bridge that can withstand not just the winds we expect, but the unexpected hurricane.

In science, we see this all the time. Newton’s laws seemed absolutely true until Einstein came along. Was Newton wrong? Not exactly. His view was incomplete. Einstein’s theories didn’t invalidate Newton’s work; they expanded on it.

The point is this: holding multiple perspectives in mind doesn’t weaken our grip on reality. It strengthens it. It makes our understanding more resilient, more adaptable, more robust.

But here’s the crucial bit: this doesn’t mean all opinions are equally valid. Some views are backed by evidence, logic, and rigorous testing. Others are not. The flat Earth theory isn’t on equal footing with the spherical Earth model, no matter how passionately flat-Earthers believe.

So how do we navigate this complex world of multiple perspectives without falling into the trap of “anything goes” relativism? Stay curious—always ask, “What am I missing?” Seek evidence; don’t just accept claims because they sound good. Be willing to change your mind when presented with better information. Recognize the limits of your own knowledge and experience. And understand that some truths are objective, like mathematical proofs, while others are more subjective, like the best flavor of ice cream.

In the end, embracing multiple perspectives isn’t about saying there’s no truth. It’s about recognizing that truth is often bigger and more complex than our single point of view can capture. It’s about building a more robust, more resilient understanding of the world.

Remember: the goal isn’t to be right. It’s to be less wrong over time. And that requires the humility to admit we might not have all the answers, the curiosity to seek out different viewpoints, and the rigor to critically examine all claims—especially our own.

This is how we build an antifragile approach to truth. Not by clinging dogmatically to our beliefs, nor by saying all views are equally valid, but by constantly refining our understanding in the face of new information and diverse perspectives.

Let’s cut through the crap. We are truly drowning in a sea of bullshit, full of self-righteous “thought leaders” who wouldn’t know real thought if it bit them in their privileged asses.

Take this LinkedIn post. This is a prime example of the intellectual diarrhea flooding our feeds. This person, clearly basking in their own perceived enlightenment, turns a simple and shall I say legitimate piece of feedback into a narrative of oppression and moral superiority. She is not stupid—she is much worse. She and her type of people are what Nassim Taleb would call a member of the “Intellectual Yet Idiot” class. And if you don’t know what stupidity truly means, check out the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. You will be enlightened.

These kind people aren’t just harmless blowhards. Whether they realize it or not, they are actively damaging the very causes they claim to champion. By reducing complex issues to simplistic platitudes and personal anecdotes, they trivialize the real struggles faced by marginalized communities. They are not advancing dialogue; they are stroking their own egos and maybe even padding their bank accounts.

Every time there is a significant global event that makes a serious cause come to the surface, we see an explosion of these moral entrepreneurs. Suddenly, everyone with a LinkedIn profile and a passing familiarity with a few terms fancies themselves a social justice guru.

We should really talk about the unintended consequences of this bullshit parade. The focus on any social justice and human rights subject is beyond crucial. It should be on our minds on a daily basis, in every action. And when it is not, we should at least make sure we are causing no harm. But every time a cause is hijacked by these charlatans, it creates a perverse incentive structure where being perceived as “woke” becomes more valuable than the actual cause itself.

Consider the simple daily dilemma faced by genuinely talented individuals from underrepresented groups. They are often left wondering: “Am I here because I’m brilliant, or because I tick a box on some diversity checklist?” This doubt, seeded by the very initiatives meant to promote inclusion, can be crippling. It can even be paralyzing.

And when you engage in the simplest conversation with these self-proclaimed saviors, they immediately reveal their ignorance. I wish I could see deeper conversations about serious systemic challenges, about how we can truly advance concepts like “distance traveled,” a measure of merit that accounts for the obstacles an individual has overcome—to put it in simple words that don’t do it justice.

The real tragedy is that these moral crusaders, in their rush to claim the high ground, are trampling over nuanced, substantive discussions. They’re not interested in the messy reality of systemic change. Whether they realize it or not, they are seeking applause, not progress.

I will stop the angry ranting here and try to talk about solutions to this phenomenon of moral crusaders. First, we need to sharpen our bullshit detectors. When someone starts pontificating about their “global impact” and how they’re “healing the world,” I promise you it’s BS. There is no such thing as global impact. Local impact is possible; the only thing possible globally is harm.

Second, we need to elevate voices that are actually doing the hard work of social change, not just talking about it. Look for people who speak with humility, who acknowledge the complexity of these issues, and who aren’t trying to sell you a $500 online course on “decolonizing your mindset.” Just the title itself is an oxymoron lacking any simple logic. That’s a conversation for another time. But here is your hint to ponder on this title: if your “mind-is-set,” then is there room for any change to take place?

Finally, and most importantly—I am so sick of this BS—we really need to reclaim the discourse from these moral absolutists. Real progress happens in the gray areas, in uncomfortable conversations where people are willing to admit they might be wrong. It happens in the listening, in the silence, in leaving room for the marginalized to say their narrative no matter how long it takes and how hard it is for you to wait until they get over their imposter syndrome to finally express their stories. Anyone else relaying the stories of marginalized people without a minimum of self-awareness is a selfish, benefit-seeking idiot. True discourse does NOT happen in echo chambers filled with self-congratulatory circles of “Intellectuals Yet Idiots.”

The stakes are too high to let these charlatans dominate the conversation. Climate change, systemic racism, economic inequality, colonialism, human rights—these are real issues that require serious thought and action. They won’t be solved by Instagram infographics or TED talks. I may be very wrong and I truly wish I am. The algorithm itself is an echo chamber; I don’t really see room for those hard conversations to take place.

But if I am wrong, it could only be solved through these platforms if the moral absolutists are self-aware. If you are an ally, be an ally, but do not fucking appropriate the cause. If you are an ally, always consult the people with skin in the game. When I say consult them, I mean truly consult them—empower them without imposing your opinions on them. Keep in mind you have different experiences. Respect their silence when they don’t want to talk or when it is not the right time. Respect their view of not wanting a certain way of change. Empower but don’t impose.

And until we free ourselves from these groupthink echo chambers and learn to recognize and reject any brand of performative morality, we will continue to spin our wheels while the world burns. And that’s not even an exaggeration—the world is literally burning, whether from the heat trapped melting the ice sheets into devastating floods in South Asia so we can keep our “lifestyle,” from the Congolese mines getting us our Teslas and iPhones, or the bombs air-striking children so the old new land remains a Utopian notion.

In this age we find ourselves, it’s all too common for people to crave not just any opinion, but an opinion that’s so potent it could jolt you awake. Often, these opinions are concocted after watching a few quick TikTok videos or reading a regurgitated summary of a book or idea in a Facebook post or a thread of tweets. By the time these half-baked notions reach our minds, they’ve morphed and lost their core essence.

We’re living in an era where many folks fancy themselves as “woke,” using their self-proclaimed moral high ground to educate anyone they label as privileged or ignorant on the virtues of their own version of morality. On the flip side, there are those who are convinced they’ve cracked the enigmatic code of the universe—you know, the whole conspiracy thing. They think they’re so brilliantly smart that they can’t even hear the passionate cries of the “screamy wokes.”

All of this plays out in a grand spectacle of short videos, tweets, and social media posts. It’s a battlefield of ideas, or at least, what some believe to be ideas. The clash of these two fronts, with all the moralism flying in every direction, is pushing us headlong into what might be termed the “fascism of the 21st century.”

It’s crucial to realize that the cacophony of half-formed opinions and self-righteous moralism isn’t leading us to any promised land of enlightenment. Instead, it’s sowing seeds of divisiveness and extremism. We ought to take a step back, revisit the true essence of ideas, and engage in meaningful, informed discourse that transcends the boundaries of tweets and TikTok videos. Our future depends on our ability to navigate this minefield of opinions and truly understand the complex issues at hand.

The concept of martyrdom, deeply embedded in various cultures and religions, carries significant weight in the Arabic language. However, a striking linguistic anomaly accompanies discussions of martyrdom, as the verb or expression “someone has been martyred” lacks an active voice. This linguistic peculiarity not only impacts the language itself but also reflects and perpetuates certain problematic aspects surrounding the act, or the lack of act, of martyrdom.

The absence of an active voice in the Arabic expression for martyrdom creates a linguistic void that can lead to removing the responsibility of the individual responsible for the act. Whether it is the killing of someone for their beliefs, or the killing of the self for a certain belief, by removing agency from the perpetrator, the language downplays the significance of the action, making it challenging to fully grasp the gravity of the act of taking someone’s life. The lack of accountability inherent in the passive construction undermines the moral responsibility of the actor, contributing to a skewed understanding of the consequences of such actions.

The passive voice not only deprives the perpetrator of agency but also transfers a certain degree of agency to the individual who has been killed. This phenomenon, often employed to console the grieving family, inadvertently contributes to the normalization of martyrdom. By framing the act as something that happened to the individual, the passive voice obscures the often controversial circumstances surrounding their barbaric killing. This linguistic manipulation can, in turn, transform martyrdom into a celebrated event, diverting attention from the underlying questions of why this killing happened in the first place.

The linguistic structure surrounding the concept of martyrdom in Arabic raises profound questions about agency, responsibility, and the ethical implications of violence. By critically examining the passive voice used in describing someone who has been martyred, we uncover a complex interplay between language and societal perceptions. Addressing this linguistic anomaly is not merely a matter of semantics; it is an opportunity to foster a more comprehensive understanding of the ethical dimensions of martyrdom and its broader implications for society. Ultimately, acknowledging the importance of agency in verbs is essential for grappling with the complexities of moral responsibility and the impact of language on our perceptions.

What’s worse is that martyrdom is sometimes the ultimate goal.

Some people believe that becoming a martyr ensures a direct and swift passage to heaven. This belief has led to the idea that martyrdom is something to be desired, and some individuals even envy those who attain this status.

For some, the dream of becoming a martyr can overshadow the true meaning behind such sacrifices. Instead of focusing on the noble cause of defending other humans or one’s own beliefs or land, the desire for martyrdom itself may become the primary motivation. This shift in focus raises concerns about the underlying intentions behind such aspirations.

Sometimes I even question whether the person’s motivation is rooted in a genuine desire to help others, or if the pursuit of martyrdom has taken precedence.

Survival is individual. Truly. Changing your own conditions, or at least the way you respond to such conditions—even if brutal—is infinitely more tractable than trying to engineer the world. Control what’s within skin-in-the-game range. Everything else is noise.

Survival is an act of the individual—by the individual, for the individual. To reshape your life by the force of your will is not only possible—it is the only path open to a being of reason. To wait on the collective, to appeal to the mob, is to surrender the sovereignty of your mind.

I came to this view not from reading Stoics or motivational posters, but from life bruises. Years of trying to fix the world through volunteering and research, from small scale (the family level) to bigger scale (Moroccan youth, coops, small businesses). Watching dysfunction repeat itself in a cycle. People expecting salvation through aid, slogans, bureaucracy. No skin, no game.

You can’t build while you’re crumbling. If you’re collapsing internally, your contribution to the collective is a liability, not a virtue. Self-maintenance is not selfishness—it’s a prerequisite. You cannot offer strength while feeding on weakness. If you believe in collective work—fine. But your first duty is to the highest possible version of yourself. The Nietzschean high, if you will.

But—and here’s the cancer—what we now see in the “individualist salvation” crowd is mimicry. Shallow libertarian cosplay. “I’m fine, so who cares?” “The herd suffers because it’s lazy.” A parade of fake stoicism wrapped in wellness-speak and TEDx determinism. No mention of structural decay, no accounting for top-down predation. Just sermons about mindset. Mindset. A word I deeply dislike.

The core of individualism isn’t escapism. Not evasion. You are not seeking independence—you are practicing indifference. It’s not an excuse to ghost the commons, or to moralize suffering from a place of fragile privilege. It’s armor. Against the parasitic class that commodifies struggle. Against those who weaponize “the greater good” to extract from you while they stay untouched.

Real individualism is about earning the ability to say no. It’s freedom. To preserve agency. To not be used.

True individualism is not isolation; it is integrity. It is not about turning your back on others, but refusing to be used by them. It is the refusal to let your life be consumed by those who trade in slogans, guilt, and unearned demands.

You do not owe your soul to causes older than your birth and vaguer than your reason. But you owe yourself clarity, purpose, and the moral courage to say: This is mine. This is my life. I will not be a martyr (another word I dislike). I will not be a slave. And I will not be deceived.

But it does not mean you become a sociopath, or an apologist for injustice because it doesn’t touch you—yet.

The flaw in extremist individualism is this: it forgets that long-term personal survival depends on collective stability. You don’t thrive on a sinking ship, no matter how tight your lifeboat.

Survival is individual—but redemption is collective. Salvation, if it is to mean anything, must be a triumph of liberated minds.

Everyone’s chirping “Happy Easter!” as we walk into the house. Beautiful sunny day. Windy too—but it’s always windy on Long Island, especially on the South Shore, near the bay, looking over Fire Island.

We sit down at the table: eggs, some kind of bacon I can eat (probably turkey), strawberries, blueberries, French toast, mango slices, orange juice, coffee. The good china is finally out. I’ve been married to this guy for five years, known his family for nine, and I’ve never seen that china before. Apparently Easter is the moment.

My mother-in-law made the French toast. My sister-in-law’s there. Her father-in-law. My husband. Me. We’re all eating and making those polite, over-enthusiastic comments people make when they’re sick and eating something warm: “Delicious.” “Amazing.” “So good.”

Somewhere between a bite of mango and my third sip of coffee, my mother-in-law drops the line to my husband: “You’ve got stuff to go through upstairs.”

It’s practically tradition now. We don’t visit every weekend—but when we do, my husband has “stuff” to go through. His mother’s on a mission: empty the attic, kill the storage unit. A noble pursuit.

But let me ask you: how do people in this country own an entire house, and still need a storage unit? How much stuff do you need to keep? How much can you store? It’s an epidemic—this national obsession with keeping crap. I’m not getting involved. Don’t ask me to help. I’m not touching that attic or offering opinions on the psychology of American hoarding.

Still, I do get it. Rarely, but I do. Emotional attachment to objects—however irrational—can be real. Even if I can barely wrap my head around the idea of humans having souls, let alone extending that idea to a stuffed bear or an elementary school notebook. But fine. People feel things. That’s their business.

Eventually, of course, I do end up upstairs.

And there’s my husband, holding some random childhood relic like he’s Hamlet with Yorick’s skull.* He’s frozen in that existential moment of decision: donate, trash, or transfer to our house for yet another decade of emotional purgatory.

Spoiler: most of it just migrates from her attic to ours. Very little gets donated. Almost nothing is actually thrown out. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because no one else wants it either.

Then he shows me something he’s clearly sentimental about: a book he made as a kid. It’s called Dog. But it’s not about a dog. It’s a weird, cat-centric fever dream of a book—four pages of crayon drawings of cats, nothing else. No plot. Just cat, cat, cat, cat. Kindergarten surrealism.

He tells me the backstory. I stare at the cover. “Dog”? Why?

I tell him exactly what I’m thinking: “It’s a kindergarten project. So what? Throw it out. It’s been here for decades.”

He looks at me like I’m the monster. “You don’t have anything from when you were a kid? Kindergarten, first grade, something?”

Nope. And honestly? I think a lot of people from where I grew up don’t either. We didn’t cling to school projects. We finished the year, donated what we could, sold the textbooks, and gave the rest to… the nut guy.

The nut guy?

Yes, the nut guy. Every neighborhood had one. He sold roasted sunflower seeds, peanuts—occasionally almonds if he was feeling fancy. He’d roast them on a barrel over burning coal. And he wrapped them in old school papers. Your old math tests, your friend’s biology notes, some stranger’s failed history quiz—your snack came wrapped in printed human failure.

Sometimes he’d use pages to decorate his walls. Some of our childhood made it to gallery status.

I loved it. I really did. Even as a kid, I was obsessed with reading those papers. Didn’t matter what subject—if there were words, I was reading them. That’s probably why people loved sending me to buy nuts. My neighbors, my aunts, everyone—they knew it made me happy. They’d hand me a few dirhams and say, “Go get me some sunflower seeds,” and I’d run off, not for the nuts but for the paper. I’d stand by the nut guy’s barrel, watching him fish through the pile of wrappers, waiting for my turn. And as soon as he handed me that warm little pouch of seeds wrapped in someone’s discarded paper, I’d look at it like a gift.

I had a routine. I’d come back, hand over the little twist of warm nuts—still wrapped in that used, inky school paper—and they’d take the nuts right into their hands. Not everyone cared about the wrapper. Most of them just tossed it, or left it on the table without a second glance. And that’s when I’d just… stand there. Waiting. Burning with curiosity. Watching the paper like it was a lottery ticket. Once their hands were full of nuts, they’d finally give me the wrapper, and I’d snatch it like treasure.

If it was mine, I’d crack the seeds open one by one while scanning the page—sometimes a vocabulary quiz, sometimes long division, once even a breakup letter. It was an adventure. A little treasure hunt. Sometimes I’d correct the mistakes, if I knew the subject. Other times I’d get high school material as a little kid, and I’d just sit with it for days, turning it over in my mind. The nuts were the work; the reading was the reward.

I still do it. Every time I go home, I buy nuts just to see what paper I get. Some random kid’s exam. Maybe they aced it. Maybe they bombed. I read it all. Seed by seed, page by page.

My husband just stares at me. “Wait, wait—cashews?”

Cashews? In the early ’90s? Please. We didn’t know what cashews were until Morocco jumped a class or two. Cashews were for the socially mobile. And even then, you didn’t get them in recycled math exams. They came in plastic containers. Fancy.

And now? Everything’s in plastic. We’ve got shops filled with nothing but plastic. Whole ecosystems of throwaway packaging. China sends us more every year. Maybe the nut guy doesn’t need our books anymore.

He is still stunned. “You really gave everything away? You have nothing left from childhood?”

Nothing.

Even my vaccine book—the official record of my childhood vaccinations—probably ended up with the nut guy. That same book I needed when I got accepted into Cornell. Ivy League and all. I had no proof I was ever vaccinated. My mom shrugged. “Maybe the nut guy has it.”

So what did I do? Got re-vaccinated. All of them. From scratch. TB, BCG, whatever. Took three months. Cornell probably thought I was raised by wolves.

But that’s how it is where I’m from. We don’t worship paper. We don’t build shrines to our second-grade homework.

So no, I’m not about to get misty-eyed over some crayon-drawn cat labeled Dog.

Keep it, toss it, donate it. Just don’t ask me to weigh in.

* The metaphor might be wrong. I have watched Hamlet exactly once, in a somewhat ugly modern opera in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, and I slept through most of it.

I’m not often nostalgic about my childhood. Sometimes I am, but often not. It was full of violence. Things happened to us kids all the time, at home and outside, day after day. But I don’t think I ever felt that the life we were given was especially bad. That was our reference. We did not know the alternative. So it was just life. That’s all. We grew up knowing we had to make life hard for others before they made it hard for us. Too much trust or no trust at all. Weird dichotomy.

Of course, I would have liked to have the polite manners the schoolteacher and books talked about. But I felt they didn’t fit our neighborhood, not even for girls. Women fought each other even more than men did. They grabbed each other by the hair and hurt each other. Hurting yourself was like an illness.

When I was a kid I always wondered whether I would meet the actors, the players, anyone on TV, if I could just cross the glass—meaning the screen. Obviously I was immediately told it was impossible, and I was disappointed and totally forgot about that thought.

Today at the US Open I was enjoying an Aperol spritz at the lounge before the start of the men’s doubles final, and once the game started I watched a bit to finish my drink, then left and came to the live game, the Arthur Ashe stadium—and boom, that thought was back. That childhood dream is happening. I didn’t have to break the glass or anything, but OMG, did I just move from screen to reality in less than five minutes?

This morning I learned, for the first time, about the Moon. Its far and near sides. And I realized we are all like the Moon—one familiar face we show to the world, and another side that remains hidden, even from those closest to us. The side we present is like the Moon’s near face—those gentle dark seas, those familiar craters we’ve named and mapped, those features everyone thinks they know. We smooth our surfaces, let certain shadows pool in predictable places, show our scars in a way that makes sense to observers.

But our far side—oh, that’s where the real story lies. Like the Moon’s hidden face, we carry a landscape violently marked by impacts, a testament to every collision we’ve survived. There’s no smooth maria there, no gentle plains—just the raw evidence of every hit we’ve taken, crater overlapping crater, each memory carved deep into our core. It’s rougher, more chaotic, but perhaps more honest in its way.

Some might say the far side is darker, but that’s not quite true. Like the actual far side of the Moon, it’s not darker at all—it’s just more scarred, more raw, showing its history more plainly. No dark seas to soften the appearance, just the pure, harsh reality of every impact that shaped us.

And like the Moon, we’re locked in this eternal dance—always rotating, but somehow always keeping the same face toward those we orbit around. It takes extraordinary circumstances, a special kind of voyage, for anyone to see our other side. And when they do, they might be surprised to find that what they thought was our “dark side” isn’t dark at all—it’s just different, marked by different kinds of truths.

The baskets were moving fast between each fidget, the sandals too, but for different reasons.

Two lattes—one small, one medium. A decaf coffee. A croissant. Two cookies, one chocolate, one matcha. And a duchess—all white and sweet. The table: square, brown, unremarkable.

Beneath it, a pair of green Birkenstocks slid politely aside, making room for coral-painted toes. The pedicure popped. More coral spilled under the table, the hem of a dress wrapping around skin like a quiet flame. Skin stretched over muscle and vein, waiting—no, yearning—for a stimulus of its own choosing. Something she could offer, not just receive. A stimulus to be shared, not imposed.

She was tired of the world pushing its chaos onto the body. Algorithms, feeds, billboards—all undressing us. Not physically, but mentally, spiritually. Peeling us away from our core, where randomness lives and freedom begins.

Her collection was an answer. Every piece designed to respect the body that wore it. Fabric chosen for its silence, its subtlety. No loud patterns. No synthetic noise. Just form meeting form. A quiet design.

But touch wasn’t enough.

Sight and skin were a beginning. She wanted more. A third sense. Something that could flood the wearer’s world and hold them there. « Complete their experience ». Those were her words. Sound. Not just background music, but a composition—intentional and intimate. A note, then another, building into movement. A small act, a scene, a performance. A living opera stitched into cotton, silk, wool, linen.

Each piece had a story. A story of a vision and many hours and places. Japan, Astoria, the Garment District, Morocco, Flushing.

The story deserved reverence. And the customer, the center of it all coming together, deserved the full experience.

And so, in the corner of a café in Astoria, over coffee, milk, and crumbs, three creative minds began weaving something stranger and more beautiful than they expected. A woman with a vision, a musician with ears tuned to life’s purity, and a writer just learning how to trust the sound of her own thoughts.

They didn’t plan a brand. They planned a scene with no plan.

She slept in the new place last night, first night alone there, so we met halfway in the morning. She walked from the new place, I walked from the old one. Same café, different walk. Not avenues now, just streets.

She was already there, latte in hand. I got my decaf. Sometimes they make it right. They had the beans today.

She started talking about the hygiene podcast. She’d finished it already, gave me the gist before, but now she wanted to tell me the whole thing. So we talked hygiene, health, food, shampoo, deodorant—the stuff people start talking about in their thirties, not even out of necessity, just curiosity. Like, wait, what’s actually in this? Why have I never checked?

We opened the Yuka app, went through the history, laughed at how crazy the shit we consume is. We said we should get going. She needed to clean. I said I’d help, but I was fading already.

It came up again.

We stayed in the café a bit more. The old idea came up again and won’t let go of us. The clothing-scanning app, the one she pitched last year. I didn’t love it then. Too big, too much. Ratings for clothes based on fabric, chemicals, dyes, child labor, supply chains, environmental impact. Smart but overwhelming. I told her then it was too much for me.

I didn’t have the time to commit.

But now she brought it back. Not as a sustainability thing—as a health thing.

Or at least that’s what I understood. And that hit. The amount of polyester in our wear. Our skin can’t breathe.

We are suffocating. We are wrapped in plastic.

It all clicked.

We eventually got up and left the café.

We talked the whole way back to her place. She cleaned. I opened Claude, ran a search, pulled mock products, started building. No real product yet, just vision.

We iterated as she scrubbed the floors and counters.

She finished cleaning, gave the keys to the doorman, walked to the new building.

Both of us interrupted—little pings, texts, emails—but the idea was still there. Like a hum.

Exhaustion and hunger took over me. I went home, ate goat cheese and honey and bread, a pear, some walnuts. Sat down just to sit.

Feet up.

Hit up some emails. Then my brother called. He’s in college, CS major. I told him the idea.

He asked the technical stuff. Data sets, interfaces. How do you source fabric details, how do you test, how do you verify. His questions made it realer. He didn’t laugh it off. He stayed on the line, kept asking.

Later that day I met the other friend, last walk of the day. We do that—two, sometimes three walks. Today a new route. Astoria is different now. Different corners, different windows.

Different houses. Not the same avenues.

We kept talking. No notebook, just voice recorder. Recorded everything. Switched to English, easier for transcription. And then I said it. Told her:

This is it. This is the thing. Like those people who have the idea and someone else writes it down, someone else figures out the margins. We have that now. AI does it, my brother does it, the recorder does it. We just walk and talk and it gets done.

It felt like that. Like we were walking through some glass building in Manhattan, maybe. Big windows. Someone fast-walking beside us holding a tablet, writing everything down. Except no one’s there. It’s just us. Walking, talking, making.

He came in late. Not unusual. Half the class was still trickling in, dragging excuses behind them like their backpacks. The D train stalled, sick baby, double shifts, two jobs, always two jobs. I barely looked up. I didn’t say anything. I used to ask why—first semester, first year, all fresh with hope and stupid rubrics. After a while I just accepted that the deep NYC runs on broken time.

Class ended and he lingered. Just stood there like something still needed to be said: “I was at Rikers. Visiting my brother. Heading back took longer than usual.”

Rikers. Ha! Heard of it. What I heard, and what I understood, is that it was not just a metaphor. Rikers was a bus, then a body scanner, then a waiting room, to get to the person on the other side of steel and maybe glass.

I didn’t mark him late. I didn’t write anything at all. I kind of froze. All delays were beyond logistical and deeply structural, and I just ignored them, but this one was unignorable. There is only so much you can fight with punctuality and rubrics. Structure—the deep one—is not one of them. You can’t push for punctuality. I was just glad he showed up, tired, and present.

Six balançoires in a row. Four men, two women—early to mid-forties. The heat is thick and unmoving, the kind of NYC heat that feels like it’s clinging to you. Everyone’s dressed for it—thin t-shirts, tanks, athletic wear, water bottles sweating just as much as the people.

Each adult is pushing a child. And each one is on their phone. Not hiding it. Just calmly, mechanically scrolling with one hand while pushing with the other.

The kids aren’t laughing. They aren’t even smiling. Just moving forward and back like metronomes—no joy, no resistance.

I’m sitting on a bench across from them, watching, unintentionally locked into the rhythm. My head follows them side to side, the way it would during a tennis match from one of those center seats—good view, no escape. There’s something hypnotic about it. Not in a peaceful way. Just… strange.

No one’s talking. The adults aren’t talking to each other, or to the kids. Just isolated pairs, sharing no energy. The only shared experience is the motion.

And I start wondering: why don’t we also get balançoires? Adults, I mean. Why are parks only for people under twelve or dogs? Why is it socially acceptable to run aggressively in circles, but not to just swing back and forth for no reason?

I imagine walking over and sitting on an empty swing. Yes—that’s the English word. It finally came to me. Walk over. Just to feel the movement. Not for exercise, not to reminisce. Just to move. But of course I don’t. That would be strange.

I would love to do it anyway, but gosh, they are really not making it appealing. This isn’t play. It’s motion without presence. Parents pushing. Children being pushed. Screens held. No scraped knees, no loud games, no accidental friendships. Just tiny orbits, perfectly managed.

It’s efficient, in a way. It feels like watching life through a screen door—technically present, but also not really. Maybe that’s why the whole scene feels odd. Because we’re keeping everything going, yes—but no one is actually in it.

When I left the bar—I think it was our third bar, or fourth, maybe fifth, I truly don’t know—we had been hopping around Casablanca like people who had forgotten tomorrow existed. And when we stepped outside, the moon was right there, staring at me.

It wasn’t normally that close. It shouldn’t have been that close. I swear it was dripping silver light straight into the ocean, like it had just taken a long, too-cold bath. Too bright, painfully bright. I actually had to yell at it.

“Why did you fall so close? You’re usually far. This full moon is insane.” I was yelling at the moon in the middle of the street.

And the moon—of course—kept apologizing to me in this embarrassed little voice. I’m so sorry, something happened with gravity, it said, wobbling as it tried to keep itself upright between a high-rise and the minaret. Please don’t tell the sun. She thinks I’m reliable. I don’t want her falling in tomorrow—it would burn the hell out of you.

My friends laughed and shoved me into the car. The whole ride home I kept thinking I needed to go back and tell the moon to fix itself, to go back to its place. We couldn’t have the sun dropping in on us tomorrow. That would destroy everything. That was the rightful order of the universe, wasn’t it?

We got home, played some Moroccan shaabi music, and danced. And at some point—I think in the middle of trying to be graceful—I did a roulade, one of those moves I must have absorbed as a child watching women dance in the neighborhood. Mimi shook her head and said, “Okay, you’re going to bed. That’s enough. Stop the music.” But she handed me a giant glass of water first. Then another.

I drank everything, then finally went to sleep.

The next morning I woke up with a terrible headache. I remembered the dancing, the water, but not much about the moon. I didn’t even think of it until Mimi came into my room and said, “Oh hey—how’s your moon doing? Remember that big projector outside the bar? The stadium light? You really thought that was the moon. That was so funny.”

I washed my face, didn’t even look in the mirror, made coffee. Burned my tongue. Checked my phone. Mimi had texted me—“Drink water.” That was it. No mention of the projector, no teasing. I thought maybe I was being granted a grace period.

I went out to get msemen from the corner place, the one where the woman plays DJ as she cooks. You know the type: those madwomen ladies in Morocco who handle the hot plaque like it’s nothing, flipping the dough with these sharp, rhythmic gestures. They don’t even look at their hands—just slap, stretch, fold, spin—like they’re mixing tracks at 8 a.m. Their wrists do this little twist, and for a second you expect a beat drop.

But the minute I stepped by the msemen stand, everyone stopped talking. Not like a movie freeze. More like they all suddenly remembered something at the exact same time. Every head turned toward me. Not angry, not suspicious—just… too curious. Like they knew something about me that I didn’t.

The msemen lady squinted at me and asked, perfectly normal: “Do you want your msemen soft or crispy?”

As if nothing weird had just happened.

On the walk home, random people kept giving me that same look—half-recognition, half waiting for something. My stomach contracted. I started to panic.

By the time I got home, I was sweating for no good reason. I shut the door, kicked off my shoes, and headed straight to the bathroom. Something about all those stares was crawling under my skin.

I flipped on the light. Looked up.

And there it was.

PESSO-OPTIMIST—in giant, smudged, marker letters, right across my forehead and down my cheek. And underneath it—the dramatic, looping kind—المتشائلة. Crooked. Bold. Absolutely not subtle.

I just stared. Honestly, for a moment I thought someone else was looking back at me. Some alternate version of myself who had gone out and made choices I wasn’t present for.

My hair was wild. And the word on my face—this hybrid of pessimism and optimism, this permanently conflicted identity—looked like a diagnosis.

“Wili wili,” I whispered to the mirror. “I walked through the streets like this.”

I pressed my fingers into my forehead, smudging the marker even more until it looked like war paint.

So they say life is so random that anyone can get rolled like a dice, right? They throw one toss, one spin, whatever, and you get whatever number comes up. That’s kind of how life looks—bad beats, good breaks, ups and downs all mixed together.

But here’s the trick: if you’re always handed the good dice, if your life is mostly privilege and not many real challenges, everything goes smoothly. And when everything goes well, how are you supposed to realize that you’ve been holding the good dice all along? Maybe by comparison—but that’s not enough. You still might not feel it. You can’t really be aware of how good your dice are unless you’ve also experienced the bad. That’s just nature. That’s just how the science of life works.

I’ve had a lot of challenges in life, honestly. But I’ve also had real luck—my life does not look at all like the one it “should” be. It’s completely unpredictable, but in a good way. It depends on what instant you take, where you pause the timeline. Most of those pauses look good, incredibly good.

So how do I know I’ve been holding the good dice? Only because I’ve also had those real challenges, the tough ones. If I didn’t have them, I think I’d be almost completely unaware of how fortunate I’ve been. Maybe I’d know a little, but not nearly the way I know it now.

Every four or five years, life gives me a hard challenge. And each one helps me remember just how good of a dice I’ve been rolled in this random life.

After all, no tree can grow to heaven if its roots cannot make it all the way down to hell—something said by Carl Jung, I think.