# Third Time

I woke believing it was sickness,
some ordinary cruelty of the body—
a throat closing around fire,
a voice disappearing,
my strength leaking quietly
into the sheets.

I prepared myself for medicine.

Instead,
I walked away with questions
far heavier than strep.

And now I am standing here
for the third time this year,
trying to understand
how survival became something
I learned through repetition.

Three times.

There is something obscene
about having to count them.

Once is terror.
Twice becomes a pattern you fear.
Three times makes you stare at the calendar
and wonder how many ordinary mornings
you have taken for granted.

But I am still here.

That is the sentence
I refuse to whisper.

**I am still here.**

My hands can shake
while they fill out the report.

My voice can barely exist
and still tell what happened.

I can be frightened
and furious
and exhausted beyond language
without surrendering the one thing
this year has repeatedly demanded from me:

my life.

So today there will be paperwork.

Dates.
Symptoms.
Names.
Timelines.
Whatever evidence exists
placed carefully beneath fluorescent lights
instead of carried alone inside my chest.

I will tell them what I experienced.
I will tell them what I know.
I will separate it carefully
from what I suspect.

Because truth does not become weaker
when handled precisely.

And whatever the investigation finds,
whatever name eventually belongs
to what happened to my body,

one fact requires no investigation:

I survived.

Again.

Three times is three times too many.

And I am done treating survival
like something quiet.