THE WEEK I RETURNED to Los Angeles, I dreamed I had anesthetic awareness during top surgery. My eyes were closed and I couldn’t move. I felt the surgeon sliding fat and glands out from under the incisions, leaving empty pouches where my breasts had been, then stitching the flaps of skin back down to my chest muscles. The combination of immobility and consciousness wasn’t so terrifying. I breathed into the sharpness of the feeling as they finished closing me up and was calm.
In the dream I woke up groggy. The procedure had been its own trancelike dream within the dream. After, I sat slumped over in a wheelchair, eyes a quarter open. I wore a compression top velcroed around my chest to keep the skin down. It kept me inside myself, a tight hug. A stranger wheeled me through a hallway into a waiting room.
Then I was in the lobby of my high school: grand, red-carpeted staircase, marble floor, classical Greek statues cast in plaster framing the entryway. Circles of girls whispered, and circles of boys messed around with each other, their backpacks slung over one shoulder. A few pubescent couples sat on the bottom steps, holding each other’s hands with awkward purposefulness.
I leaned back against the wall in an oversized army-green T-shirt and baggy blue jeans. They hung on me, as if my mom had gotten them with extra room for me to grow into. I wasn’t hunched over, but I still felt concave. My arms were at my sides, not crossed over my chest in a protective X. I ran my fingers through my hair. It was thick and a little stiff. I looked down at my fingers. They were long, rough. The veins on the backs of my hands popped out. A muscle in my forearm twitched when I moved my thumb. I felt an energy stored in my back, my shoulders, my biceps; if I needed to pull myself up, or push myself over something, I’d be able to. I loped from one side of the lobby to the other, the bottoms of my jeans dragging under my shoes. Loose and limber, I moved gently. My body worked. Relief. So much relief. I let myself believe this was a permanent state of being.
I woke up from the dream in my bed in Los Angeles, expecting strength and flatness. Lying on my back, adjusting to the morning light, I slung one arm under my head, reached down with the other to scratch my chest. My hands felt small, like a child’s. They found breasts. Lumps between me and myself, between me and whomever I wanted to feel against my chest, between me and the world. The thing about these appendages was that, even though everyone I’d ever slept with assured me they were especially good tits, to me they were utter surplus. One lover had commented on the perky, upright optimism with which the nipples pointed toward the heavens. This made me develop a habit of stretching the nipples as far as I could toward the ground, until they looked like those pink cusk eels that live in the bottom of the ocean, slithering without sunlight.
I could never, once the breasts started to grow, see them as a permanent part of me. It seemed like if I pricked them with a needle or cut a slit at the bottom of each sack, all the excess liquid should drain out and the skin should pull itself taut again, back against my ribs, where it belonged. I imagined that the seeping liquid would be white and thick, like the mucus that gathers on the stems of milky sap plants, all the food of the hypothetical children I would never have gathering on the floor below me in a puddle. Better there than inside of me.
I flipped over onto my stomach, the flesh-mounds underneath me, and wrapped my pillow around my head. Loss, dread, betrayal. All-encompassing disappointment filling in the space made by longing. Without someone next to me to hold, I had to face my own body.
Zoya had been distant. She had warned me this might happen but that I shouldn’t take it as a sign of her diminishing love. Nonetheless, within seventy-two hours of returning home, I’d begun writing the script of my own rejection, just as she’d cautioned me not to. And, to make the script bearable, I’d reverted to—or, more accurately, marched on with—some of my preferred coping strategies: alcohol, ketamine, cocaine, anything that was available. Substances, whatever their effects, melted my masterful, forensic analysis of every moment into an indiscernible sludge. When I was sober, I surveilled myself. My sentences, my twitches, my limbs, my hand motions, the way I gasped for air at the end of a sentence. At least, if I was sludge, I could relax. Uppers and downers, as different as their outcomes might be, have a shared strength, which is their ability to take you either over or under yourself, until you’re far enough away that you don’t have to be yourself at all. Or whoever you’ve convinced yourself you are.
When Zoya did call me, it was at strange hours: five a.m. her time, after a night she hadn’t slept. She told me she’d looked at apartments in Mumbai and found one near the sea, where she’d put a desk in front of the window. She thought I’d like sitting there. She kept the logistics of our reunion abstract. I pushed toward concrete planning. Could she visit me in June? Could I come see her? I’d have more money soon; I’d buy a plane ticket. I’d come for the summer. Maybe I’d stay.
I’d been cycling through our two and a half weeks together on repeat, looking for clues as to whether what happened between us was more than just a convincing hallucination. Looking for signs that I could continue to be the person she desired even when I was away from her. I still had heightened sensation in the spots where she touched me: the back of my neck, the tops of my shoulders, my forearms. She had made them radiate some kind of warm, tingling potential. I hated myself for still believing that one person, a lover, could rid me of whatever kept me hating myself in the first place.
I kept the printed picture of us from the photo studio in its white envelope, hidden in between books. The ritual of taking the picture out of the envelope grew increasingly masochistic: instead of reminding me I had existed alongside her, it made me that much more aware of her absence.
It’s not that I hadn’t been in love, or in pain, before. I met Antonia when I was twenty, and six years later we were still entangled, neither technically together nor wholly apart.
Antonia had big owl eyes, and her pupils dilated when she focused on something. She was also a photographer, like my mother, which gave her gaze a particular power. Her beauty pulled at something ancient in me, provoked an urgency that made all previous desire seem manageable in comparison.
The first time we met, she stared at me as if I was hiding something. I still had long hair then, which I kept out of my face with bobby pins. I was still a young democrat and a young woman. She appeared to know something about me that I didn’t yet have language for.
As things progressed, Antonia never called me pretty or beautiful. She intuited what would be most uncomfortable and necessary for me to hear.
“You’re not a girl,” she’d say. “You’re too handsome.”
It seemed like if I followed her, I’d end up somewhere I’d always assumed was off-limits to me: a place where people externalized their desires without ambivalence.
Early in our relationship, Antonia started photographing me. Never all of me, just parts of my body, isolated in the frame. My elbow, chest, foot, or knee, alongside objects she’d collected and anthropomorphized: a bone, a burnt fan, an ax, a rose. She’d print the images, then distort the pictures by burning, freezing, or bleaching them. Once the final image was complete, I was illegible; another component in an abstracted surface. In the final image, the visible parts of me barely looked human, let alone female. Submitting to her vision was a home, of sorts. I was something abstract in her eyes, something more mercurial than girlhood.
When I found the courage to ask Antonia if she was having sex with other people, she told me desire was not a scarce resource. I set out to prove to her—but mostly to myself—that I agreed. I lost my ability to sleep, spending the night in half-dream hazes of her fucking men, women, and creatures that made her feel things I never would, never could. When I suspected she’d been with someone else, I vomited, then said things like, “I’m in pain, but I would never want you to limit yourself because of me. Trust that I know my own limits.” Really, I was sick with jealousy. This jealousy registered in my body as it had when I was a teenager and I saw a girl I fixated on directing her attention toward a boy. Antonia affirmed that her devotion was unwavering, made space for all my paranoia. But I couldn’t explain away the fear that she didn’t love me, that someone else—anyone more masculine than I was—would replace me.
Previously, I had understood myself as sane, insofar as I hid my perversions underneath my high-achieving-blazer-wearing-female-debate-champion-with-a-side-braid persona. As a child and an adolescent, I developed compulsive strategies for suppressing my preoccupations. When I longed to kiss or tie up girls, I recited the provinces of Canada, or ranked the most famous European modernists, or made lists of cities with each new one starting with the last letter of the one before it. Information calmed me down. There was so much to know. The more I knew, the more special I’d be. Gropius, Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe. Saint Petersburg–Guadalajara–Ankara–Asmara–Arezzo–Osaka–Amman. British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland, and Labrador. West to East and back again. I reminded myself I’d be something great when I grew up. I would hide my visions and build great buildings instead, or I’d build great enough buildings that the visions wouldn’t matter. I drew homes partially built into hillsides or suspended off cliffs hanging over the oceans. Museums, government offices, and hospitals as beautiful as they were practical. I pictured big, clean, open rooms I’d shaped. Everyone would feel important and clean inside of them. Light would pour in from all sides. I imagined an apartment where there was nothing around me I hadn’t chosen on purpose, because it meant something or because it was beautiful. I imagined a closet full of suits, organized by color.
Soon after I fell in love with Antonia, all the pushed-down pain erupted. Every moment I had ever believed I was unlovable seemed to rise, such that I was utterly inconsolable about betrayals she had yet to enact on me. She stayed, trying to help me understand what I couldn’t yet say.
Two years into our relationship, Antonia and I dated someone together, Stella. She wore red lipstick and lots of black lace. She bought slices of raw steak at the butcher shop in the morning and ate them with her coffee. When we met, shitfaced in a rooftop hotel swimming pool, surrounded by bankers, the first thing I asked her was what she did, which was make music; the second thing I asked her was whether she wanted to be famous. (I was always blacking out and asking people about fame, then. I needed to know they could be honest about the power it had over them, over everyone.) She said no. Two days later was Antonia’s birthday, and the three of us had confusing sex in my parents’ bed, on top of the same pink sheets where I’d had sex for the first time.
In the subsequent configuration, I fluctuated between jealousy and euphoria. When I slept between Antonia and Stella, I felt an abundant safety for which I had no language. Three was a family; at times, it seemed unbreakable. But if I woke up to them embracing, I spiraled into existential dread. Seeing my partner, my supposed anchor, sleeping peacefully in the arms of another person—this was a loss not only of security, but of identity.
Our first fall together, the three of us went to Maine, to the town where Stella had spent her adolescence. We drove around in her car, an old Mercedes coupe; I didn’t have a license yet, but they let me drive the twisty country roads anyway. We drove to a field where we walked through shoulder-height goldenrods. On the other side of a pine forest there was a cliff next to a lake. The three of us had sex on the rocks and I scraped my knees. After, I slid down into the water. I swam backward, away from them. They started to have sex again without me. The water was cold and it numbed my skin. Watching them, I stopped having a body. I was the water and the water was me. If I wasn’t me, there was nothing to be afraid of. No one could leave me or stop loving me. I didn’t exist, and so I wasn’t Grace. I wanted to stay watching them in the water into infinity.
Along the way, I fell in love with Stella, too. In her company, my body was less constraining. I noticed myself making bigger gestures, moving without fear of my own clumsiness.
My devotion split in two. I split in two as well. Afraid to risk losing the love of either of them—and the sense of self summoned by each—I clung to them both, managing simultaneous realities that could not coexist.
Ultimately, Antonia and I stayed together. But more and more people in my life began to accuse me of dishonesty. My mother told me I had a lying bone. A friend who had caught on to my habit gave me her marked-up copy of a 1975 Adrienne Rich essay called “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.” Rich writes that the liars, afraid of themselves, cannot bear their own contradictions, cannot face what might be lost if they are honest.
I said whatever I thought people wanted to hear. I’ll be there at seven p.m. sharp. Yes, Saturday works. No, I love you and only you. I’m certain. I desire no one else. I’m hungry. I’m not hungry. I miss you. I need you too. I want to come. I’m coming. I just came. I’m sorry. I’m not angry with you, and I don’t resent you. I couldn’t lie to you. I didn’t lie. I didn’t lie. I didn’t lie. I didn’t lie about lying.
Calling something a lie implies that one has the truth in one’s mouth and swallows it. What if one can only speak—only think—what one suspects another person wants to hear? Then where is the truth? How does one learn to think it?
The more I suspected people thought I was a liar, the more impossible it seemed to tell the “truth.” There were so many truths; I didn’t know how to locate one. Lying was embedded in every gesture, every statement, every interaction; every time I reaffirmed the presumption that I was female, which was constantly. I resigned myself to being incapable of not lying. To do otherwise would require being a new person entirely, one who had not fashioned themself—“herself”—around hiding.
I felt continually closer to unraveling each day back in Los Angeles, each day that Zoya seemed more like an apparition. Random things made me cry. The person dressed as the Liberty Tax mascot on the corner of La Brea and Pico. An old woman in a purple gown pushing an empty stroller. A sign outside a boarded-up turquoise bungalow that said “Institute for Levity.” A fucking hummingbird. Everything burst with meaning. Everything was a mouth about to swallow me.
I couldn’t interact with anyone or anything without absorbing their feelings—or, more accurately, what I perceived to be their feelings. A hybrid sponge-sail, I sucked it all up, then lost my course. I wanted harder skin, better boundaries, interconnectedness without losing myself. I hated my body, even though I could hardly feel it.
I hesitate to call the exhausting day-to-day of embodiment “dysphoria,” that catchall for the pain of having a body that doesn’t align with one’s sense of self. What was a sense of self, after all: a delusion; mental illness. I struggled to believe my own discomfort. I just felt crazy. And if I admitted I was dysphoric, I’d have to deal with the fallout. I’d have to decide whether to do something about it.
In its most basic definition, dysphoria simply means “a state of unease.” The unease was far-reaching. I was vapor trapped in a container. The bugs I held hostage in Tupperware when I was a child. A windowless room with no doors, a single dangling light that never turned off, no beginning and no end. An eternity without sunlight, a breeze, moisture, the crickets chirping through the window. Coming to in a shut coffin, six feet underground, shrieking at graveyard earth. Waking up on Pluto, perched on its gray curve, the galaxy in front of you, unreachable. The ocean underneath Antarctica, entirely encased by ice. Rising to the underside of a frozen lake, sealed off but pounding. Never being touched. Never being spoken to. Never being looked at. Claustrophobia in perpetuity; isolation in infinitude; the body experienced as every metaphor for confinement.
How to know if the problem was gender or personhood. How to know if the problem was gender or me.
This was where drinking came in. It melted me, postponed the question of whether I needed to be an active agent in escaping my own bodily claustrophobia. When, as a teenager, I started binge drinking on the weekends, I woke up with foggy memories: a boy’s tongue in my mouth; his hand down my pants; vomiting. The memories of a regular girl, having fun. I hadn’t enacted them; I had drunk and so they had happened to me.
The first time I got high was in the woods in Prospect Park. A group of boys had showed a group of girls how to inhale and keep the smoke inside long enough. It was September, still warm, and I was dressed up in a three-tiered baby-blue miniskirt. At first I didn’t feel anything, just the sting of the smoke in my lungs. Then my eyes started throbbing in my skull. I was wearing tight goggles and being a teenager was a video game. Everyone else was real. The boys were handsome, happy, and full of laughter. The girls wanted their approval. Each boy was a main character, an amalgamation of characteristics that rendered him a leading man. Letting men be protagonists was indulgent and pornographic. It was not what I’d been taught. It was nasty, backward, even medieval. The more I tried to block the boys from becoming protagonists, the more I succumbed to the storyline. Until his hands were my hands, his feet were my feet, his dick was my dick. The story always ended with him—with me as him or in him—seated in a chair, head back and eyes closed, moaning in ecstasy, a girl’s mouth around me. The scene throbbed in the back of my eyelids, begging for completion, for ejaculation.
I went into the trees and lay down on the ground. It was cold and I had goose bumps all over my skin. But my body wasn’t real so the cold didn’t matter much. The skinny, breast-budding, miniskirted pale thing was just a container. I focused on my heartbeat and felt it pushing blood through my body. I felt the blood sloshing around inside me, hot at the edges of the container. I looked down and saw a dirty little skirt and gangly stick legs. When I closed my eyes I felt the blood forming into an extension of myself, long and hard, lifting up from between my legs. I felt the tip of myself radiating heat and numbness, an ache in the base of my back that curled my spine and toes. I counted to sixty-four, pushing the tingling feeling further out into the extension at each number. I counted to sixty-four again. Soon the numbers were so close together that they stopped being separate. Then I was hollow, a porcelain casting of a person, filled with liquid light. The cast shattered. There was no container.
After that I became addicted to the splitting feeling. It hurt a little, and I knew that when it hurt my body cracked and I wasn’t me anymore. It was just a few seconds but the crack was so big that it got me through the day, knowing I’d get to split again at night. I lay in the dark on my back and counted to eight, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Eight times. If I got too close to the crack I stopped and stepped back; at sixty-four, I let it swallow me. It was like this for a while, just counting until I let the painful ache get huge, until I figured out that I could pair it with the visions I’d made in my head since I was little. I used class, when I was supposed to be paying attention, and the subway ride to and from school, and the walk from the train to my house, and the elevator ride, and every other moment I was alone and undisturbed, to visualize the scenes, down to the colors, individual touches, and dialogue, then play them in my head like movies. I was never in the movies, because I wasn’t compelled by myself as a character. Usually, the star was a young, handsome, kind boy. He was pale and lean, but strong. Soft-spoken, but severe. He had thick brown hair and thick eyebrows, and posture that made him curl like a question mark. Sometimes he was with an older woman; sometimes, an older man. They coveted him and he lay there like a baby when they touched him, overwhelmed by how much they wanted to hold him.
A few weeks after I got back from India, I started having panic attacks again. Deep, rolling ones that hit hard and then came back smaller, again and again. The rhythm of panic was oceanic. I stayed still, letting the swell run its course, resigned to the fact that I might not emerge.
I had my first debilitating panic attack in the bathroom of a midtown theater, at a premiere celebrating the release of my sister’s television show. I was wearing a light gray suit that had previously been my father’s. My first suit. In the lobby of the theater people grabbed at me and asked me how proud I was. “So, so proud,” I’d say. “Couldn’t be prouder.” I was as angry about fame worship as I was guilty of it. I hadn’t learned any other way to be.
I sat in the audience between my parents while a young woman spoke onstage in a beautiful dress provided for the occasion. The walls of the theater were red and gold. She made jokes and the crowd laughed in a joint roar. The woman onstage, from a distance, shared many physical traits and speech patterns with the person whom I knew as my older sister. It was an effective hologram, a convincing depiction of a smart-but-humble, funny-yet-earnest young woman. A rosy-cheeked, lovable daughter of the audience. On my right, a striking, gray-haired man in a trim suit and thick-framed glasses sat with his hands folded on his lap. He looked like my father. The elegant redheaded woman known as my mother sat on the other side of me, clutching my hands with her long, pale fingers, her red manicure. I was supposed to know and love them, swell with pride for the woman onstage. Either they were imposters or I was a sociopath. The theater was an opaque box with no exits and it was rapidly running out of air. Being a daughter was a show was a myth was a commodity was a white lie was a dream was a movie.
The panic attack announced itself in this way: at first, the sped-up, echoing voice of Amelia Earhart, my narrative ghost, calling out to me. White aliens, she was saying. White aliens. White aliens. White aliens. The words made it hard to breathe. I had the acute feeling that no one I was looking at was real. White aliens taught other aliens to succeed at all costs, to put the dissemination of one’s own message above all else. White aliens taught white aliens that to die alone or a nobody was the worst thing a woman could do.
I went to the women’s restroom, which was empty, and entered the large corner stall, where I vomited up water and popcorn and collapsed onto the floor hyperventilating. I wondered if I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t breathe and I clutched at my chest. Clawed at it. It occurred to me that my body was not mine. Neither was my brain. Grace? Who is Grace? I was a cloud stuck inside a person I didn’t choose to be.
At some point the sobs subsided. I splashed water on my face. I went back to the theater. I explained away my momentary break as the product of my burgeoning political consciousness. I was learning concepts to explain why the world around me looked the way it did: money hungry, fame driven, alienated, and bereft of care. Naturally, I was having physical reactions.
Afterward there was a party. I drank. People talked to me and I answered, the good student that I was. College is wonderful. I’m really enjoying my classes. Yes, I’m dating someone, an artist. I’m so endlessly proud of my sister. It’s a lot to live up to but I’m just glad she’s getting to live out her dreams. I’m not sure what I want to do. I’m interested in a lot of things. Journalism, politics, law. I agree, it is important that there be visible gay women in power.
That night at Antonia’s, she fell asleep and I stayed up, curled in a ball on the floor. The more I tried to stop crying the more I hyperventilated. It occurred to me that I’d never been real. I recalled being a child and the memories felt as if they’d been implanted, pictures downloaded into a manufactured brain. That was a nice time, being young in a small world. That was a nice time, getting to be a child. I heard myself talking to Antonia, sobbing; it was the voice of a little girl who wished she was a boy.
After that night, the sorrow bubbled up from its unnameable source more and more often. First, just at night. Then also during the day. Soon, in explosions of anxiety that swallowed up whole weeks.
The more disoriented I became, the more I clung to Antonia. If I found the right words to tell her where I was, why I was there, she could pull me out of isolation, keep me close to her. I remember sitting on her bed, hunched over while she stood looking down at me, just telling her it hurt, over and over. I couldn’t tell her what the it was because I didn’t know.
Unable to contain my frenzy of need, I wrote Zoya a scathing email accusing her of hiding from my love. I thought I was being brave and honest. In retrospect, I was just being desperate. She wrote back, a day later, a gentle and measured interrogation of my entitlement to her emotions, of my unseemly, and particularly American, impatience.
Ashamed, I went to a party. I needed to be sated by something, though I didn’t know what. In a warehouse between two industrial neighborhoods, the party was full of hundreds of shirtless, mostly white gay men. I did ketamine and coke. Rather than relaxing into euphoria, I was engulfed by envy for the homogeneity of their bodies—the V-lines where their lower abdomens met their obliques; their visible triceps muscles; the shadows underneath their protruding pecs. The men appeared to be dancing with their own twins. Slight mutations of the Mark Wahlberg genus. The substances in my bloodstream heightened my awareness of the testosterone in theirs. Sculpting, chiseling, hardening, and enhancing them. Estrogen dominant, I would melt and soften until I turned to liquid, milk on the floor.
Back when boys started going through puberty, I kept lists in my mind of which ones had hair under their arms and above their lips. The ones who got hair first started looking stronger, too. They weren’t so scrawny anymore. Those same boys got extra-sweaty and smelled bad. That was all because of testosterone. Some of them even had lines on their abdomens, or biceps that bulged when they pulled a textbook off the shelf. When their shirts were made of thin, soft cotton, you could see their muscles through the cloth. When I was alone in front of the mirror, I copied some of the movements the boys did in gym class—throwing their hands up in frustration, clapping to get another player’s attention, hitting their fists against their chests when they were happy, knocking their heads back when they were frustrated. I did the movements and watched how the cloth of my shirt caught on my skin.
I lost my sense of linear time and found myself on the stage at the front of the party, a plywood and paint re-creation of the Oval Office, hung with portraits of Trump and his cabinet, splattered with white paint and glue meant to look like jiz.
A man I didn’t know grabbed me and kissed me. “It’s a bukkake show,” he said.
Bukkake. Milk. Mark Wahlberg. The White House. Aliens. All aliens. I could either be part of the sea of white men or let dissociation vaporize me, turn me into a nanoparticle of condensation floating into the oblivion.
Orbs of dislodged emotion levitated above the ground. Claustrophobia. Dread. Loneliness. Infinite, already-failed solutions. A lonely ghost who can’t cease to be itself. The men became floating cubes, backed by blue light. What’s the difference between a man and a box, anyway?
At some point I dragged myself through the warehouse to the outdoor port-a-potties. Inside the port-a-potty I tried to pee standing up. Piss drizzled down my legs, onto the gray plastic ledge around the toilet. Then either the lock got stuck or I couldn’t figure out how to open it, so I slammed myself against the door. One, two, three slams. The port-a-potty started to tip over. I got out mid-tumble, watched it swing back and forth, wavy, until it reached standing position and was sturdy again.
The next day, unable to get out of bed, I called my best friend Jessica and admitted to needing her. She came over, made me shower, laid a blanket over me, forced me to eat, and fed me a corner shard of Klonopin, splitting the rest of the pill up into three pieces and wrapping them in tinfoil.
She was my oldest friend. As teenagers, we both believed we were disgusting, albeit for different reasons. She was one of those beautiful girls who believed she was rotten. The distance between our interiors and exteriors bonded us to each other. Back then we rode the train home from school together every day, getting off at the same stop and standing on a street corner talking until it was dark out. I thought about coming out to her for many years before I finally did. She was the only person to whom telling the truth seemed at all possible. But I couldn’t get the words out. They sat in my throat, stuck. When I finally told her, the confession pulled the seal off my solitude. She is, perhaps, the only person I’ve allowed to watch me change. Thus, she is the only one who knows my continuity. I’d like to think we provide coherence for each other and, in doing so, make changing safer.
She’s always been the one to both schedule and escort me to obligatory appointments—the DMV, the cognitive behavioral therapist, the gynecologist.
“You know this is about you,” she said. “Not Zoya.”
She told me my obsessions were a stand-in for what I didn’t wish to look at in myself. I knew she was right and I also resented her scrutiny. I wanted her to let me be in love, let me use that in-love-ness as a compass so I could pretend I had direction. The hope of pretending is that, with enough time and practice, the performance becomes you.
That night I sat on the floor of my room and wrote a list of New Year’s resolutions on a piece of pink printer paper I’d found on the carpet at Staples, even though it was already March.