But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.                                                                                                    --From Desiderata by Max Erhmann Houghton, Michigan        When I was 16, I didn't fear death. I welcomed it. I had little to live for aside from my perpetually worsening acne that was supposed to get better each year but never did. Susan and I would ride around in her white Toyota Camry, music blaring, windows down, and ocean air flooding through the car. We'd alternate between angry and hopeless with Nine Inch Nails, and sad, melodramatic and brokenhearted with Tori Amos' "Baker Baker." I still don't know what the song means exactly. But then, I don't think I ever wanted to know. I just wanted to feel, and feel deeply. Yet, at the same time, the lyric from another one of her songs made perfect sense to me: "So you found a girl with really deep thoughts, what's so amazing about really deep thoughts?"        But now, at 23, when life is really only on its way to beginning, I'm convinced that at any moment something is bound to get me. I don't fear the obvious; I drive all over town every day, and ride on airplanes to and from Southern California quite often. Calling this small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan home was at first a challenge, but somehow after a year and a few months, I don't mind that most of my neighbors own several guns and count the days between Bambi hunting seasons. I know that the mere 150 inches of snow we had last winter was "nothing." There are no palm trees here, and while Lake Superior--the shores of which are a five-minute drive from my home--is a large body of water, it carries no smell of salt like the ocean at my other home. And though I don't always enjoy flying as I used to, I'm not particularly scared of it, either. The planes take me between my opposite homes. It's my body that's going to fail me, get me, or somehow destroy me. Living alone means that when I die, my death will go unnoticed for some time, until the stench gets to my neighbors (whom I don't know well enough to expect them to keep tabs on me). Or perhaps I don't show up for a graduate seminar or for teaching my first-year writing course for a lengthy amount of time. Either way, enough time will have passed for CPR to no longer be helpful, nor bypass surgery, nor blood thinners.        To make matters worse, I now live in such a small town that we don't even yet have 911. Of course, we do have local phone numbers to dial for the police and fire departments. But somehow having to remember and dial seven digits instead of the seemingly universal magic three means it's going to take a long time for someone to save me from the heart attack or stroke that's just left me breathless. Anyway the medics here only recently acquired automatic defibrillators, and who knows if they've used them enough times to really understand how to work the machines. Not that I hope they've managed to kill people in their preparation for saving me.        A friend's mother once told me that, as teens, we think we're invincible, but then we wake up one day and realize we're not. My awakening now prevents many nights' sleep. The sleepless night starts with a cold foot. Generally it's my right foot. And from there I try to remember which side of me is supposed to go numb during a stroke. Paragraphs from WebMD and some of my "self-diagnostic" books float through my mind. Symptoms, signs, written proof that I have the disease I think I do. Sometimes these thoughts cause my right arm to follow in suit, to tingle, though not go cold. I turn over onto my left side, rub the bottoms of my feet together to get them warm. Feel my heart pound against the soft blue flannel sheet. So, it's a heart attack instead of a stroke tonight. And I think about the birth control pills I take to keep that acne-prone skin clear, and how they might cause a blood clot to form, one which would then shoot through my legs to my lungs or heart.         My upstairs neighbor pounds across the floor above me, and I take comfort from the fact that she hasn't gone away for this weekend. I wouldn't even mind if the loud, thumping bass of today's music selection came through the floor, though ordinarily it makes me so angry I can't sleep. But then there's also that "Coach Disease" I heard about on NPR; if you sit too long on an airplane (or lie in bed, I think!) your blood clots, and again, a particularly large clot shoots around your veins like the little white ball in a pin ball machine, waiting to get stuck somewhere and kill you.