Congratulations, it’s twin…xyphoid processes!

Today I discovered my second xyphoid process. Scientists are skeptical, but I’ve been fully transparent with my discovery, and they’ve yet to find fault with my methods or reasoning.

The xyphoid process…correction, a xyphoid process, is one of the most terrifying parts of the human body. It’s one of those things you’re better off not knowing about, so you should stop reading right now if you have any sanity left to lose. Joe Rogan said that Naval Ravikant said that Confucius once said “We each have two lives. The second begins when we realize we have only one.” He had another less famous truism: “The xyphoid process follows the reverse quantum observer effect. Instead of the Zeta function collapsing, discovery triggers a bifurcation and another xyphoid process emerges fully formed in a random location on the body. Stay ignorant for as long as you can.”

Confucius was ahead of his time.

Still with me, psycho? Okay, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

When I was in high school, I developed a mild paranoia for a highly specific horror movie scenario: getting a paper cut on my eye. I didn’t know if anyone had ever gotten one, but it sounded so horrible that people must have had them all the time. Murphy’s law and all. I forget what triggered it. It might have been because my friend Bryan started constantly rubbing his eye one day, and then a day later said he’d gone to the doctor and they’d spotted a little cut on it. They had to put him down. I wish I’d thought to ask how he got it, whether it was paper or something more sustainable, but I was probably too busy spiraling.

For the next month or so, I would fantasize about getting a paper cut on my eye and the innumerable ways I might go about accidentally obtaining one. There were definitely more ways to get one than not, and I’d already used up most of the latter. There was paper everywhere in the early 2000s, right up until the landmark United States vs Ninefingers case of 2007 birthed the law that prohibited teachers from distributing weapons to children. Paper gave me goosebumps which I wear to this day.

That was just the proof of concept.

One day in college, a close friend whose name I cannot reveal because I still hope to live in his mansion one day when he’s filthy rich and develops an acute need to give to charity, my future “mooch daddy,” told me that he’d found his girlfriend’s G spot. “It’s right in the middle of her back!” he whispered excitedly, like he was handing me the Pentagon Papers. “It drives her crazy!” I couldn’t disabuse him of the notion because there were activists waiting in the wings, apt to say a man had no business telling a girl her G spot wasn’t on her back, and also because it was hilarious and I couldn’t wait to hear him tell others about it. Sadly he found some other good samaritan before I could reap that crop of laughs. I did learn something though: organs were wherever you thought they were.

Which brings me to the xyphoid process. Correction: the first xyphoid process. The first xyphoid process is a little tab that hangs down from where your ribs meet, right at the solar plexus. I learned about it when Yuanyuan was taking Anatomy and Physiology I. I don’t remember what it does, but I do remember that if you touch it, or even look at it sideways, it’ll break off and play pinball with your other organs.

As soon as I learned I shouldn’t touch it or let people give me CPR, I began to feel its presence. You know how if you focus all your attention on your thumb, a minute later you start feeling the blood pulsing there? It’s the same with the xyphoid process. Think about it for a few seconds and you develop a gnawing feeling where your ribs meet, like something’s sitting there plotting against you, just waiting to be set loose. A ninja star that’s sharpened by every caress of awareness.

Today certainly didn’t seem momentous. I woke up, made breakfast, ate it, listened to some noise on Twitter, nothing out of the ordinary. But when I was getting my second bi-hourly hug this morning, Yuanyuan’s face was nestled in the hollow of my throat and as she was disengaging, she doubled back and tried to kiss my Adam’s apple.

Bang.

That’s when I realized I didn’t have an Adam’s apple at all. Never did. It was like those pictures they show you of a butt or an inner thigh or a breast and ask you which body part it is, and they all turn out to be kneecaps, through the miracle of photographers having too much time on their hands. I had a second xyphoid process masquerading as an Adam’s apple. I knew it was true because it was suddenly a clammy evil presence in my neck, radiating malice. Let the paranoia begin.