I.

I tested myself with my handheld device. My device says I am experiencing irrational exuberance. I never go anywhere without my device. White men over the age of 60 are advised by three out of seven doctors to take the new purple pill. I got a checkup. I was assessed for risk factors. There were warnings and some things became five times more likely to be dangerous. There was a lunch of genetically enhanced frankenfish. I drank a beverage laced with powders. The real names of these powders are unpronounceable by 87% of human beings. White men over age 60 were able to get free samples. The side effects varied. Some had nausea. I put my head in the microwave to feel its gentle hum. It felt good, maybe 56% better than a hair dryer. I took a sugar pill and experienced some real or imagined symptoms and cures. I made an archive of my results and parsed the data using a shiny supercomputer with a tiny motherboard. The circuits made a pie chart of my love in brilliant technicolor. I graphed my feelings of anxiety and doubt using both x and y axis. I cried and petted the cold machine that told me that I had a 74 % chance of finding a soul mate. Crying might have been a side effect of information retrieval, or it might have been real salty tears. I was told that results may vary. I imagined a world free of warnings. I imagined my life free of risk. I imagined a life free of blind spots that only scientists can see into and exploit.

II.

I experienced identity theft. Criminals stole my ones and zeros. My data was reconstructed by villains into a human girl. They sit at laptops with their white collar crime hoping to be sent to a country club prison if caught. These desperados steal credit numbers and banking numbers and social security numbers and shop, eat at fine restaurants, order expensive tennis shoes, fly off to Bermuda. What do they become when they face paradise? Do they when they carry my identity in a fancy leather briefcase and deplane into humidity, surrounded by palm trees? Do they drop my identity in the Bermuda triangle like so much garbage, to be lost forever, swallowed by the sharks and seacreatures or caught in the tangle of the man o’ war? I know like I am lost, like so many prop planes, episodes of The Twilight Zone, soggy leather luggage, beautiful glistening estate jewelry, all resting at the bottom of the sea.

I detected it when they stole my identity. I was sitting alone and heard a noise, sort of like a bark, but mixed with tires squealing and knew that something was wrong. I felt the air move violently past my face like a bullet.  I called my doctors and they said it was just detached and unlocateable anxiety, floating untethered to my psyche or to any other object. They asked me what it tasted like, and I said, “bitterness.” They asked me what it looked like, and I said, “It was vast and yellow. It was pervasive as sun.” They asked me what it smelled like, and I said, “my sweat.” They asked me what it feels like, and I said, “nothing, like empty space.” They told me to take two pills for fast, effective relief.

III.

There was a high wind advisory and all of my windows flew open. The surf was up and gentlemen risked their lives on the coast. The wind passed through and might have been the cause of my irrational exuberance. I am not sure I ever wanted to be 100% cured. But still the wind passed through, scouring, opening windows, flying under cracks in doors, slipping under waves and flipping them into tsunami. The wind whispered a message to me about panacea. The wind said, “Life has a love of its own.” I weighed myself on the Torino scale. I looked at the fear barometer, the graying round shape, rusting as it moves between levels of primary colored alarm: orange, red, blue, green, yellow. The wind is blowing in my hair, pushing at my skin, where I felt its force and cool weight, it was pointing to yellow. The needle hovers and twitches in the yellow zone, alerting me to the level of significant fear, an elevated condition, which I am told, is the new reality.