I asked my therapist if she thought I was autistic. That’s not why I started seeing her, though. It was the self-loathing, which is perhaps to blame for my disquiet around my own kind. I adopt the language of the four legged. When you live with someone, it’s normal to start to pick up on their mannerisms, their speech patterns. This remains true even if the cohabitation involves the nonhuman. At least once a day, I think about our shared DNA, the long twining branches of our family tree, all of us animalia. I was a horse girl, part horse, part girl. Spent hours galloping through the grass, racing, leaping, snorting, shaking my mane. A shapeshifter, a wolf girl, prowling through the snow, tossing my head back to lose a primal howl skyward, calling to a pack of kin that would never come. Did you just growl? A boy once asked me. I think he was into it. Her answer, by the way, was no.