On her way downtown, she shifts her weight on the hard bus seat as she anticipates a text from a friend. Next to her, a man with bags of groceries in his lap taps his foot impatiently. Her cell phone vibrates in her hand. She and her friend continue to exchange feelings of dissatisfaction with the lives they recognize as pale and privileged:

I have panic attacks because I feel trapped inside my head, she tells him.

I sit in my room with the doors shut and hope nobody knows I'm in there, her friend writes. But when no one comes looking for me, I get lonelier.

I think there’s something wrong with my brain, she says.

I don’t want to end up as old and as dumb as my parents, he concludes.

She has a well-paying job at a successful technology startup, where she works long startup hours, has dramatic startup meetings in glass-doored conference rooms, and wears the startup uniform of button-up shirts and feathered haircuts. She has two expensive startup coffee drinks a day, enjoys startup beers in the evenings, and smokes startup bowls with her coworkers after that. She pays startup rent and has a startup view of the ocean. She feels startup gratitude for her life and startup guilt about gentrification.

Once in a while, she attends parties in Oakland where she tells people she is a writer. She goes on dates requesting failed relationships not be discussed and requesting professional lives not be discussed. She is a drunk date, a flirty date, a confident date, a fun date.

She goes to open mic nights all over San Francisco, orders gin and tonics with extra lime, and watches twenty somethings and fifty somethings grasp at self-expression, inspiring polite applause as their sentiments belong only to their imagined tragedies, imagined lives, and imagined versions of their souls. She is addicted to watching people in this way, soaking them in as they yearn for something bigger, as they stand in front of others while in possession of a sort of gall she can’t relate to.

Often, she thinks about madness and its residue on human history: genocides, fascism, private prisons, and the commodification of spirituality. At 2 a.m., alone in her bed, she thinks about the men who aren’t there next to her. At 2 a.m. she thinks about her mother, who is alone in her bed, and she thinks about her father, who is alone in his. At 2 a.m., she thinks about animal instincts and tribal loyalty.

In the spring, for two full weeks, she becomes convinced that if she falls asleep, her heart will stop. It’s been nearly a year since her college roommate’s brother passed away in his sleep. He’d taken a mysterious pain killer and some allergy medicine, and as far as anyone could tell, the combination was lethal to his particular body chemistry. He died peacefully in his sleep, ignorant that he was about to die, that his heart would stop beating softly and suddenly, that his funeral would be just five days away, that his sister would wail like a lost child while riding the subway upon hearing the news that her brother was dead.

Though such a delicate departing is rare and difficult to believe, she is convinced her expiration would be similar and immediately forthcoming. She knows that this is panic. She knows she isn’t dying but is certain that she is.

I’m dying, she texts her friend.

You’re panicking, her friend replies.

My heart is going to burst inside my chest.

You’re all right, her friend assures.

Throughout this spell of crippling and chaotic yearning for control over her own fate, she takes two showers a day. She feels dirty and oily and covered with itchy skin she wants to scrub away. When she finishes trying to clean her body, she cleans her home, religiously wiping the small accumulation of dust from certain crevices that have already been given more attention than such crevices demand. She feels the air and surfaces around her are suffocating her, coating the inside of her lungs with a dry, cotton-like substance.

Of course I’m being crazy, she writes in a long text one night. But the difference between me and actual crazy people is that I know how crazy I am. The thing we fear when we fear insanity is not knowing how crazy we are.

But if you know yourself, her friend says, then what’s killing you?

That evening, she takes a melatonin and dreams she is pregnant with quintuplets. She dreams of going into labor, of giving birth to two baby boys, one baby girl, and two penguins. But the penguins are not baby penguins. They are fully grown, adult penguins, with whole lives already lived inside of them — lives already lived inside of her. She pulls the last bird out from her belly, holds the penguins to her face, and asks, How long have you been in there? They stare back at her, their eyes as dark and distant as the cavern in which they were bred. How long? she asks, shaking their fresh and worn bodies in her hands. How long?

She wakes up early the next morning. She makes coffee and climbs out her window onto the emergency fire escape. There she stands and sways, sipping her hot coffee as the wind whips tears into her eyes. She looks down at the traffic below her feet and feels empty, hollowed out.

She fears her thrownness in the world. She dreads the thought of becoming a specimen of her time and her place, rather than a freer thing. She feels afraid when she cannot feel calm while drinking her startup beer. She sees surrender in ordering her gin and tonics. She is afraid of where her thoughts go when she cannot sleep.

She uses the Internet for research:

To see a penguin in your dreams expresses your frustration in dealing with those around you. It also means that the problems in your life that you have magnified are not as serious as you think, and you can overcome them. If you continue to see a penguin in your dreams, you need to find inner balance. Stop and take stock of the situation around you and look for harmony within yourself.

She nods earnestly as she reads unreliable sources.

She wants to talk. She wants to tell people who she is, or rather, discover the words that could define her. She wants to come across her identity in a book or another material object she can point to and say, aha! There I am! Her spirit aches for long conversations about delusion and wanting and childhood trauma and the silly, ugly glories of humankind.

You aren’t trying hard enough, someone tells her.

So, she downloads a dating application to her phone and she swipes left and she swipes right. She starts conversations with men who have not sent her a message yet. This is going well, she writes, amused with herself.

You seem normal. Why are you on here? asks a bearded Ph.D. student from Austin.

If sounds were currency, what would a $100 bill sound like? asks a white guy in his twenties. Have you ever smelled the belly of a bird? asks a 33-year-old ornithologist.

She video chats with men rather than meet up with them in person. This feels safer, emotionally, and more productive, intellectually. When she does meet them in person, their relations last only the one night, maybe two.

She returns to work when she is prescribed medication that makes her mind feel far away. Her apartment is clean, her skin is soft, and she notices empty space between her thoughts.

She starts to sleep whole nights and begins to consider that what she’s feeling from time to time is joy. These moments are how she can be certain the SSRI was the right choice. She recalls the concept of thrownness and finds comfort in the truth that humans universally suffer from the constraints of time and place. She decides freedom is impossible for her, for anyone, and that freedom is just a word.

She thinks again about the history of madness and, this time, its residue on her own life.