The uncertainty is what gets to me. I sit in the back of class and swing on an inner pendulum.

I'm fine.

I'm dying.

Time slips off my wrists like water. If I could watch from a higher dimension, I would see myself flattened along a string of events that make up totality of my life. I'm six and twenty-six, born and dying. I'm always happening in a small parcel of temporal space. One speck of stardust, a pack of events held together by sinews of thought, destined to vanish like all the others before it. Reduced, recycled, reused. The fate of everything from a star to a single cell.

I'm fine.

I'm fine.

I'm fi