I needed headshots and my parents had found a photographer, Branden. He was a cool, young, hip guy and beautiful to look at. I was still fifteen, closing in on sweet sixteen, when my mother dropped me off at his house in Laurel Canyon for my photoshoot. We weren’t that long into the photoshoot when I began to undress. I don’t remember if Branden nudged me in that direction or if the atmosphere of soft lighting, music, and focus on me seduced me into revealing more and more of myself. It seemed this was required, desired.
The connection was clear to me. If I was going to be good enough, if I was going to succeed, if these pictures were going to make people interested in me, what better way was there than to offer up my body, my beauty, my naked self?
Branden was in his twenties and I fell for him. I fell for whatever gave me pleasure and an escape, and he was that thing. At my age, everything was amplified, too. I remember when he kissed me. The feeling lingered, a door opened, shedding light on a new path. Not long after, I became a sidekick to him and his world. He picked me up in his aging VW van. Nothing made my heart sing like the sight of him outside my high school, waiting to ferry me off to his place. We made out before even getting there.
I thought he was so gorgeous and cool and I felt so special being with him. In my diary at this time I spoke of “wanting to just be so special to someone.” Like the others, he took the physical aspect of our relationship to a certain point, knowing it was too risky to actually sleep with me. But he had me in every other way that was barely legal and satisfying.
I would have gone further. I didn’t care and didn’t see any barriers to anything regarding age. Everything that I’d had to offer as a woman was already stolen, and so it wasn’t something regarded as beautiful and precious to me anymore. Everything about my womanhood was simply a tool to get what I needed—love.
We had a ravenous attraction to each other. I remember one day driving through Laurel Canyon with him when he turned swiftly into the hills, floored the car, and screeched to a halt in a secluded turnout, as if all of life might stop if we didn’t find a place where we could kiss and fondle each other. One evening, I sat on the toilet in my apartment heating a sewing needle under a flame and burning his initial, B, into my lower abdomen.
I was in love, desperate and devoted. Many years later I looked at that scar with confusion and regret, wishing I could have felt good enough about myself, on my own, without needing to scar my body, without already giving everything I had ever had to offer to others.
I wished I could have saved a little for me along the way.
I still wonder where those naked pictures of young me went.