Grade 4. Afternoon. Lights off. Watching a VHS. Something went off in my brain.

“I’m going to die. One day I will not exist.”

I was overcome with anxiety. I felt unable to move, think. I looked around at everyone else in the classroom. “Am I the only one thinking this??”

One day everyone in this room, school, city, world, will be dead. I repressed this thought, I let the storm pass. Yet every few months it would visit me again.