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I think this July Psychosis thing deserves a better explanation. I don't completely understand it myself, but here's a story that might shed some light on the subject.

In July of the summer after I completed the seventh grade, I was still only twelve years old when I became very sick all of a sudden. I thought I must have the flu, and stayed in bed. My mother thought this was very odd, because I never got sick in the summer when there was no school to miss. The next day, when I felt worse, we went to the doctor, where they did a few blood tests. My condition worsened again before the results came back telling me that I had hepatitis B.

This wasn't hep A, which is usually transmitted through tainted food. And this wasn't hep C, which is incurable, and ultimately deadly. This was the in between kind that can lead to C, but can also be treated. Nowadays there's a vacine for it, and nobody gets it much anymore. It's a mystery as to how I ever contracted it. I could have received a bad blood transfusion at a previous hospital visit, but I never bothered to track down these answers.

The first thing I did when I discovered that I was infected was go to the row of encyclopedias we had in our family room and look up "hepatitis B." According to the Funk&Wagnals of 1970-something, hep B had a 1% fatality rate. I was calm about this at first, comforting my mother as she cried about the possibility of losing her son. But, as I became more sick, it began to eat at me.

One Percent. I was in the top one percent of my class on an intelligence scale based on standardized testing. Could I be in the bottom one percent of a health scale? I thought of the possibility of death every day as my eyes turned yellow and my muscles deteriorated. I visited doctors twice, sometimes three time a week, but all they could do was poke at my liver to see if it was still three times it's regular size, and tell me to keep on taking my medicines.

Until my illness, I always thought I was meant to grow up to be somebody very important. Suddenly I didn't care about this anymore. Maybe I was meant to be one of those kids who dies young, like the girl with Leukimia in Peanuts. I had a lot of time to think about it, and eventually learned to accept it. I have to die someday, why not now?

My mom became angry when I described my attitude to her. "You're not going to die," she told me, "You'll get better, it just takes time." It had taken under three weeks so far, and I was down to less than 80 pounds. I was at my worst, that last week in July, when it all turned around for the better. I had been doing a lot of praying, and decided that I didn't want to be one of those kids who dies young, but I didn't need to be anybody important either.

Maybe this last week of July psychosis is just my subconscious telling me something. Maybe I never should have settled for mediocrity. Maybe the choice in all of us really should be to do something that will shake the world, or simply roll over and die. Maybe I'm more certain of this statement than I appear to be.

Epilogue:

By mid-August, I was in good health again, no trace of the virus left in my blood. Although, I still couldn't play any contact sports, for fear that a hit to the stomache could still cause my liver to rupture. I had my birthday party three weeks late. It was my first boy/girl birthday party, but I was thinking more about existential thoughts than my math-team girlfriends. We went to a water-slide park, because all summer I had wanted to go down a waterslide. The weather had become too cold for it to last very long, and nothing felt right about the whole thing. Everybody asked too many of the wrong questions, about my illness. I felt cheated somewhere, as if I should have died. I thought I would have felt important had I died. It was hard to readjust to being alive again. When I went to school, everybody had grown over the summer, some had even started to grow facial hair or breasts. I, however, had just returned to my original size. Suddenly, I was the small one. Somewhere was my summer, missing and misused. Somewhere I was still dying. Somewhere, I wished I had.