“You’ll never be this hot again; you might as well enjoy it,” my friend Ally said to me, on a walk the week before my twenty-ninth birthday. I’d already been spiraling about it for weeks, given that twenty-nine is basically a death march to thirty, i.e., the reckoning. A time when you come face to face with your potential, realized or not. Twenty-nine, then, is a nonyear. It’s like being nowhere, in a nonplace, like a train station, waiting anxiously for a whole year to board the train to thirty. This makes turning twenty-nine potentially worse than actually turning thirty. Like how the anticipation of a surgery can sometimes be worse than the surgery itself.

But let’s deconstruct this sentence: “You’ll never be this hot again; you might as well enjoy it.” A sentence that was meant to console me.

“You’ll never”

Okay. Never. Never. A word used to curse a princess in a fairy tale, to doom her to a life of misery and isolation. You will never leave this tower again! Never wake up again. Never see your prince again. NEVER. A word for threatening and scaring people—never do that again, OR ELSE. Conversely, when describing something negative, like a genocide or a terrorist attack, never again is reassuring, but in this instance, it is not, because here it is followed with:

“be this hot again”

I feel it’s important to mention that I didn’t feel hot at the time. That I’d never felt hot, in fact. So to never be this hot again? As hot as I ostensibly was at 28.9999? I’ll never be this hot (not hot) . . . again? In that case, I would go the rest of my life, and therefore my entire life, without having ever been hot even once. A grave injustice. A blight on the history of humanity, if you ask me.