This is not a drill! Today, 1st of April 2026 at 2:21pm, a live video of Girl was broadcasted in an old man's ruins. It came with a piece of text: "hand reaching out for girl stuck in screen." One suspects that she just revealed her current location for the public, but where may it be? An abandoned house at the corner of the earth? Across our galaxy and into a new on? A dimension, or realm, beyond our perception? Or as close as your nightstand, where you keep your phone?
This is Girl speaking. I learned I was mad the night I sat down to write about my experience with being hospitalized in a foreign country. I was seated at the balcony, listening in on the crickets singing (or whatever it is that crickets do), and replacing it with the hushing between nurses who do not speak of the dead and the dripping. Oh, the constant dripping. Some might compare it to a tap someone refused to turn off, but I, yes, I saw it as a reminder, of borrowed time, of the fine line between driving to the mountains with a clear head and laying in a ditch as the rain drops on your scalp, one by one. Drip, drip, drip. The doctors were a whole other ordeal. Where the nurses were tender, the doctors were rough, loud, made it clear that no pain will go away just by not talking about it. They brought in their big, scary devices and did not once try to act like the sting would not hurt. They noted down the answers to the stupid questions that not even they listened to. And...

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