Nineteen

I'm nineteen, plump, with a tight ass. I've stopped stumbling over bodies the morning after, emptying out the ashtrays and recycling the cans. I've stopped blending into the couch, my heart waiting for something to happen. I've stopped pissing away my powers.

Patrick calls me from his new life and for two hours I sit in the hall closet, the phone cord stretched across the hallway and under the door. I listen to him come down, my voice his balm, and I know I am moving on. It was the fire escape that did it, finally made me brush off my magic fingers and start building this life. From my perch I see Franklin and Hennepin intersect and I think I could be okay. I could be that girl. Midas Girl.

I drop the weight, enough that people see me. Boys. Men. I like the idea of being wanted, but I really just want to make art. Every time I take a chance, it works out, and soon my world is bigger, brighter, full of opportunity just waiting there, ready, like low-hanging fruit. My circle doesn't like the new me, doesn't know this girl with the golden touch. I should move uptown, but I want to prove them wrong, so I move next door.

It's this golden girl that crashes into Joey, dressed up like Bettina Barnes, smiling like he already knows our story. We're magnets. Together we are wild, a chemical reaction. If anything, he wants more Midas Girl, more risk, more promise. When he loses his love, a boy, I hold him tightly as he cries it out on my kitchen floor, Bonnie Raitt his soundtrack. I am watching from above and see that this was always planned.

We steal away to L.A. listening to Beck's mix tapes and I worry that my now smaller, yet still too-curvy, pale body will never measure up in this toned, tanned and tucked world of too many beautiful people. Joey says it will be the opposite. He finds a boyfriend his first night in boystown. I find one, too, my first, the very same night. He's gorgeous, tall, a bit grabby. I give in quickly, ready to just get on with everything.

Joey was right, and I bloom under the attention of too many men. Still, it's not about the boys. It never was. It never is. It's about the gold. It's about busing it to 6th and La Brea every day after work, spinning pages and pages and pages of gold at Rita Flora. I see all of it. Far away from memory and the echoes of neglect I can go all in. I can be her.

Joey gets tired of WeHo, of his boyfriend, of the earthquakes, so he goes back to Wisconsin. I find a new circle. I make plans. I show them everything. The future comes into focus as I run to catch the bus in too-high heels.

And then suddenly, without warning, it's too much. I'm too much. And I can't. What if I lose myself in it? What if people start to hate the light in me? What if I can't control it and turn myself into stone?

Somehow Joey knows. He sends vampire love songs from Wisconsin and calls me home. I pack up my furniture, my promise, my plans and let the movers worry about it. My friends throw going away parties at Dodger Stadium, in backyards, in their homes and each goodbye feels like the wrong thing to do. I turn off the touch, hide the truth in my back pocket, and with a resigned heart, get on the plane.

I am twenty.