Life: sexually transmitted terminal disease

PUBLIC HEALTH ADVISORY: you are the carrier of a terminal, sexually transmitted condition. You've had it since the day you arrived. Nobody warned your parents. Nobody warned you. Symptoms present gradually. Hunger. An irrational fondness for songs you're embarrassed to admit you like. A compulsion to check your phone for a text that isn't coming. Cartilage loss. The incubation period runs roughly eighteen years, during which the infected are placed in a mandatory holding facility called school and taught long division for reasons nobody has ever fully explained. There is no cure. There has never been a cure. Every pharmaceutical company that has studied this condition has quietly closed the file, because one hundred percent of test subjects convert, eventually, to control group. Transmission requires two consenting adults. In some well documented cases, one adult and a strong enough margarita. The disease is not contagious in the traditional sense. You cannot catch it from a doorknob. You can only be born directly into it, fully infected, no symptoms yet, screaming about it immediately. Here's the part the pamphlets skip. My grandmother had it for eighty one years and spent the last six laughing so hard at a rerun of a sitcom that she had to mute the television and catch her breath. That's not remission. That's just what living with it looks like, some days. Doctors will tell you the average life expectancy runs somewhere between seventy and ninety years, depending on genetics, lifestyle, and how aggressively you avoid the produce aisle. Late stage symptoms include grandchildren, a suspicious number of opinions about soup, and a tendency to fall asleep during movies you specifically asked to watch. There is a vaccine. It's called denial. It does not work, but the side effects are extremely popular. If you are reading this, you have it too. Congenital. Terminal. Fully symptomatic. Get your affairs in order. Or don't. The mortality rate is the same either way.