When I was seventeen, my life changed forever. I know this line is incredibly cliché and people will question me when I say this, but it’s true. My existence, however, has by no means been even relatively close to the word; it was no fairy tale. And from what I have been learning recently, there won’t be a very happy ending either. My story can’t be summed up in two or three sentences; it has no simple, or unpretentious, version others can easily understand. As I lay here on my hospital bed with my family, I understand that my story has affected many different people. You can read a few pages, and confuse yourself. You may read a full chapter, and haven’t the slightest clue. However, it is not until youread the entire contents, front to back, that you’ll know the true meaning of my story; and howone individual changed not only the genre, but the title.

Who really knows if we’re alone in the universe? There are more than a billion stars painting constellations across the night sky, and ours is by far the smallest. There was a recent announcement by a team of astronomers and scientist who stated there could be as many as thirty billion habitable planets in our galaxy alone. I guess that’s the mystery of it all. That God created everything so complex that we would never understand it fully; all of time and infinite space. A trillion light-years of the observable universe filled of intergalactic and subatomic particles, all matter and energy. This includes an even smaller form; us.

Now I am no astrophysicist but to say there isn’t life outside of Earth is to challenge all theological study past and present, stifle human curiosity and query a world filled of dreaming minds. I believe in exogenesis.

We are not alone—

--And I would question any other assessment. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I have long awaited my exploration to the great unknown. I may get it soon.  From what I hear, there is an asteroid the size of Texas heading our way at forty thousand miles per hour. At that breadth and velocity, the rock will have the explosive power of one hundred and fifty Hiroshima’s, ending life as we know it; a human society gone, like our dino-predecessors.

Nevertheless, thinking very optimistically, I like our chances. There is about a one in fifty thousand chance of dying by the asteroid. About the same chance, you have to perish by tsunami wave or fireworks mishandle. Last year alone, there were over a million car crashes in America. I will bet almost one hundred percent of them didn’t happen in Buford, Wyoming.

Where chances grow slender, are in more individualized and self-inflicting forms of tragedy. Cancer.

Over seven billion people live on Earth I have called home for the past twenty-one years of my life. Seven billion! So just like home, my existence is but a small parcel in a behemoth universe.

Fourteen million are at some point diagnosed with this carnivorous disease. I have thirteen million, nine hundred and ninety nine brothers and sisters.

The gender split is relatively equal; fifty percent guys and the other half gals. A majority are mid-life to elder. Some are young and others far too.

There is a small pool of victims and survivors who make up just one percent.  The pain was not constant. It worsened at night, but I thought it had been only soreness from gym runs and track practice. The twinge in my hip graduated into a limp, and then to a doctor’s visit, and finally to cancer; bone cancer, the rarest and the most aggressive form.

One percent.

America accounts for almost three hundred out of every one hundred thousand cases of the malady, meaning simply I, an American gal from Boston, had about a one in fifty million chance of contracting the disease and an even lesser chance of surviving it. I have just under one hundred thousand brothers and sisters; two by blood and the rest by association.

Even so, that’s moirai, our predetermined course in life; the winding passage the man upstairs paves for us. I believe in that too. And no matter how hard we hope and pray, and wish for something different; we are and will always, be as we are meant to be.

Maybe demise by an asteroid is not so unconvincing at all.