The "A" Word

"This fit like clothes made out of wasps."

- Modest Mouse

I dreamed I was younger. I walked hand-in-hand with my first love, into the holy playground of our adolescence. We held each other on a bench, laughing and whispering, while our friends played on swings and jungle gyms they had long outgrown. Slowly, I became aware of a long EEG, stretched out and plastered on the walls around us. It was a map of my brain waves. And typed beneath the treacherous spikes was the diagnosis: a single, ineffable and hateful word, like the mark of Cain or Hester's letter. I had become known. My friends, the playground — my love — they abandoned me.

And suddenly, the world was more frightening, and more beautiful, than it ever was before.