Britney

I am drowning. My lungs are filling with the salty Tel Aviv water and I know that the lifeguard can’t see me flailing near the isolated rock formation and my feet can no longer find the ocean’s floor.

I fear death so much when it approaches me, and it always does, never steadily but fast like a hard punch. It makes me the most vulnerable I’ll ever be, because in that moment I am face to face with my mortality, a word that typically bears the same weight as an absentee parent or a long-lost brother. A car out of the corner of my eye, my depression asking me what it would be like to fall six stories, and now, what seems like an inevitability, the waves crashing over my head until I am lost at sea forever—this is when you will catch me at my weakest.

Funnily enough, this is being published on my 16th birthday. Of course I’d give myself the gift of morbidity on the day of my entrance into the world. The irony is comforting. ♦