When you’re young and rich and white, you feel like you have the world at your feet. And you feel like all the time in that world belongs to you.

And so you wait. To say what you really mean. To let the people you care about know how you feel. You wait until you’re skinny or you wait until your dick somehow magically gets bigger. You wait until you perform masculinity correctly or buy the right shoes or have the right wardrobe. You wait until your hair stops doing that thing that makes you feel so embarrassed, because it reminds you that you’re Jewish and you’re always going to be.

You wait. Because you have time. You have all the time that you could ever need.

I am disabled and working-class. Below working-class, honestly. I’m sick and I’m getting sicker. I’m probably going to die of my illness before I get the right treatment. That’s what usually happens to fat women who seek treatment for chronic disease. It’s sad but it’s true. The specialists push me around or send me on to the next person. I am wracking up a string of diagnoses, asthma-cvs-chronic migraines-stress-chronic bronchitis etc. Whatever it is. I throw up everything I eat for weeks, sometimes, still. I get sick with bronchitis and it takes three months to go away, and then it comes back. And then it comes back. And my heart hurts. And fighting back hurts. And I don’t want to die, but there is no place to be sick in this society. I have no safe place I can go to convalesce, not really. Life keeps coming and it keeps hitting me in the face. There is no place for sick people who can’t work in a capitalist society.

And so sometimes I jump the gun, I guess. I need the people in my life to be present and be in my life. If someone does not text me back. If someone does not care about me the same way I care about them, or if they can’t say it quickly. If someone wants me to wait and to wait for their maybe to transform into a certainty. I can’t wait. Not because I am impatient. But because I am dying.

We are all dying. Always. Life does not wait for the young and the foolhardy. White kids who have their health are protected from the ravages of time. But still time comes. Relentlessly.

You cannot be sure that you will have tomorrow. You cannot be sure you will have one hour from now. That ideal proposal you are planning. That ‘I love you’ that has been on the tip of your tongue for six weeks. That girl you always meant to kiss but you were just too shy.

That person is dying. The person you love so much is dying.

There is no day when perfection will come running. Perfection is not a golden retriever dog. Perfection has not been looking for you, the perfect owner, all this time. And you are saving nobody, by waiting.

I am dying from a broken heart, but don’t tell anybody. I am dying because there is nobody in this entire world who loves me, not purely, not enough to keep me in this world. I am dying because I am getting sicker, my body is, but mostly because my heart is giving way to another life. I have dreams in which I am dead. Death has been coming for me for a long time. I am not afraid.

I think that in the end, I was much braver than anybody ever knew. Maybe even me. But I want him to know I loved him. And that I am sane enough to say so, and mean it. And so I spoke up. For once.

We were assigned the task of writing our own epitaph, in my A Year to Live class. This has been a healing exercise for me. Somewhere, there is a record of how I felt about him. That’s enough. He is waiting for kingdom come to change his mind. He is a sunken boat. His light exists someplace deep inside himself. And I am falling, falling.

But I loved him. Truly. The best I could. The best I knew how. Even if he’s right, and I am crazy.

Crazy people die too. We all do. In the end.

And so it is important. Not to wait. Not to say the easy thing. Not to blow off the people you care about the most. Because you might not be able to fix it like you think you will. Tomorrow may never come.

You don’t deserve tomorrow. You are not entitled to tomorrow. The only thing you are entitled to is today.