My name is Rida, Rida Anne Coulter, and I'm really white.

I've tried heat lamps, sun therapy, tanning beds (which I don't recommend at all, by the way). I make sure to take my vitamin D, okay, and I try eating a balanced diet and blah blah blah.

But I'm still really white.

It's hard because every doctor I've seen has always said the same thing. Like, I wish I would've recorded every one of them and put all the videos next to each other, because it would just sound like one voice. One sharp, cold voice.

"You need to go outside more."

"Great idea, wonderful idea," I always want to say, "yeah, I haven't thought of that at all. Whoa, thanks for all that expertise I paid good money for. Thanks for that."

But I just nod my head and wait for the question.

They usually ask about my outside activity, which is stupid, because if you've ever seen me, you would know that there is zero outside activity goin' on, maybe even that ever went on.

I didn't want to say this at the beginning, but it's kind of important now. You see, I don't go outside. Like, ever. It's hard to explain, because I really, really want to, but I just can't. Or maybe I just don't let myself.

My psychologist says it's like there's lasers, thousands of biting little lasers surrounding my home. Every door, every window, just covered in lasers, so that if you even dare to touch them, your flesh burns up in a heartbeat. You watch your hand, or the tip of your toe turn red, then black like soot. That's what she says it's like.

Except the only thing is, the lasers are all in my head, and I can't see them, and no one else can see them, so they're not even real in the first place, and I know that, but they basically dictate everything I do. I know they're not real. I know that. But I still get sliced by the lasers when I go to check the mail or drive to the grocery store. I still feel an immediate fire in my lungs, as if the lasers have punctured them like a straw stabs a juice box. I know they're not real, and yeah, I can't see them. Sure. But try telling that to someone who can't see their cancer. Or knows that their plane isn't actually going to fall out of the sky. It's just stupid. Nobody does that.

Anyways, my whiteness is more of a side effect to the major problem than the problem itself. Doctors don't really care about it that much once they've talked about it a bit. Yeah, I look like a ghost, and that's fine, but they're more concerned about me being a ghost. 

Me too. 

I don't want to haunt this small, stupid house any longer. I don't want to linger until the darkest hours to pick up my mail, or work on the flowers in the front yard (I do). I don't want to have every number memorized of every fire station and hospital in the area (I do). 

I want a pet. I want a dog, a carefree, fluffy dog that can sprint around the house and walk around the neighborhood with me. I want to learn how to draw, and YouTube videos just aren't cutting it. I want to go to college, maybe for art, maybe something else that I'd find out I love when I got there. I want to have a job that's not copyediting in my bedroom on my laptop. I want to meet friends and people and hang out and throw parties and eat cool food and go to amazing places. 

And I know these lasers are just in my mind. Yeah, just like a bunch of other things are. Join the club, lasers.

But on a Friday night when I desperately want to go to a club or a bar or something, get all pretty in front of my little, smudged mirror, dance until I'm sweaty and laughing from exhaustion, it just feels easier to - I don't know, it feels easier to wait.

Wait.

I'm going to get over this, I tell myself. I'm going to cross the lasers this time, maybe even annihilate them entirely, but not today.

Not this Friday.

Not this month. Not this year, but I've got a few months left in it, so maybe I'll do it then. Well, next year's looking better, I would say.

Eventually I just packed away my mirror - my mother had given it to me - and covered it in a little newspaper, pushed it into a bag, and shoved it who knows where in my closet. It doesn't really make a difference, either, because I never get ready anymore. I don't wear makeup these days, or do anything to my hair pretty much at all. 

No one's going to see it. No one's going to see me, except the lasers which glisten and smile at me from their resting places.

I've gotten progressively whiter and whiter ever since Mother died, pale as a bone, and at this point, I'm not a human. I don't feel like a human, just a ghost. To the lasers, maybe a hunk of meat to cut and dice up for dinner. To the neighbors, well, I don't want to think about what they think, and even if I knew, I would just tell myself it wasn't true. It wasn't real.

Like the lasers.