When I was a child I was taught that I would never die. In April of this year, testing my sense of smell with a bottle of bleach to my nose while alone in my Brooklyn apartment, the constant peal of ambulances echoing in the streets below, I wished I still believed.
I was raised as one of Jehovah's Witnesses to think Armageddon was something to look forward to. God would destroy the wicked world as we know it, to be replaced with a theocracy in which people like my family could live in eternal peace. We didn't believe in heaven, but that the dead would be resurrected on a perfected Earth free of sickness and death. If I was very good, and went door to door warning neighbors of their impending doom, I would survive even when the world I knew was wiped away.
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