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.

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 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 —

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.