In September of 2021, I came across a painting online. I think I may have been on Twitter — this was before Musk bought it and made the platform inarguably subjective, and at that point of the COVID-19 pandemic where those of us in places where that made a difference (footnote: like in CA but not in FL) stayed home, and any crevasse of the internet was a place to climb into — when she showed up:  A thick conflagration of marmalade hair, brutally parted down the middle like the innnnteresting monster in my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon, extending to the floor where it disappeared into shadow like the tail of a coat or the ashen ends of a halo too grand for its own good; an upside-down triangle face, gray-blue, dominated by staring almond eyes and topped by white eyebrows extending out vertically to form wings, thick and feathery as if to take flight and bear the weight of, if not her whole body, then at least her mind.

It’s October 1992 and I have one of the weirdest jobs I will ever have. I am 20 years old, in year three of a six-year undergrad degree in Creative Writing. I still don’t have an ID that says I can drink but I do have a live-in alcoholic boyfriend four years my senior, a Mechanical Engineering major named Matt. We love each other and have spectacular sex and he is incredibly jealous, which is terrifying but will end up curing me of jealousy forever. 

Long Island, July 1989. I am 17 and a virgin (for only five more months but I don’t know that). I have graduated high school. It’s my last summer at home before heading to college in central Florida to begin to become myself.

At this point, the only things that define me are:

1. Being bullied by my classmates, my erstwhile friends, and my stepfather.

2. A strange sense of fashion (my attempts at replicating looks from Vogue and Star Hits with what I can afford from Greenwich Village secondhand stores and LI department stores, and what I can find in my mother’s closet) that doesn't help with the above at all.

3. A best friend named Kristina, who does.

4. A steady diet of books and movies, which also does.

5. A radio station called WDRE, previously WLIR, which plays weird music, mostly but not entirely from the UK, and which kids all over Long Island wear buttons for on their long black wool coats, giving each other nods of recognition at multiplexes and malls.