Every morning when I wake up, I think I won’t make it. Or I think that I don’t want to make it. I am heavy from what I did the night before and I am heavy from everything I carry inside me, and sometimes it’s too much to bear. It’s the kind of tiredness that makes you feel like your bones are fragile and disconnected. It’s the kind of tiredness you feel like cement in your shoes, like a lead X-ray vest on your chest, bricks tied to your wrists. But I get up. I get out of bed, place my concrete feet on the floor, and start the stupid routine of the day because that’s what it means to be fifteen: your mother will yell at you if you’re late for school; your father will yell at you that he’ll be late for work if you don’t hurry. Your teacher will embarrass you in class because you weren’t paying attention. Anyone and everyone will bump into you in the hallway, pushing you against the wall, and they don’t do it on purpose. It’s worse. They just don’t see you at all.

You don’t exist. You are not the slightest blip on their humanity radar. You will see that person who took your heart, cut it in half, put it in their mouth, and swallowed it, and you want it back and you think you’ll never get it… and who can live like that? Or you will remember that your grandmother has died and that is a huge black hole that’s hungry for you. And who can live like that? Maybe today we’ll have a fire drill and I’ll have to crouch under the windows in art class. Or maybe it’s real this time and not a drill. The penguins in Antarctica have plastic in their blood. Fires. Floods. It’s hot where you live, in the desert, and every year it gets worse. But you have to get up because you are fifteen, and that’s what you do in the end.