Seated at the granite island countertop in my all-too-suburban kitchen, my fuzzy-socked toes dangling above the carefully polished oak floor, I wait patiently for my mother to complete her Sunday morning ritual of cooking me breakfast. I watch her fingers carefully undoing the coils of an onion, diligently dicing red peppers and breaking bits of broccoli into edible bites. Eggs halve in her hands and easy yolk meets warm oil with a satisfying hiss. Her omelet-assembling is methodical and, as the familiar aromas of crisping potatoes and melting cheddar cheese comingle in the air, she fills the space between us with her usual banter.

My mother is a product of her upbringing behind the pristine picket fence of a supremely Catholic household (of course, this is an oversimplification, but her childhood recollections seem always to be filtered through glass the color of the roses that decorate our lawn). She raised her children in the same town she grew up in. She revels in the responsibilities of the brownie-baking, mini-van-manning suburban housewife and happily subscribes to the explicit role-playing that permeates Long Island society. Tie-clad husbands take forty-two-minute LIRR train rides into Manhattan as wives stay back to yogalates their way into size-two-dresses and shove their well-manicured hands into oven mitts. While the fact that Manhasset seems content to assign its progeny such explicitly sex-based futures has prompted me to declare I will never start a family of my own within its confines, it is not lost on me how thoroughly my mother enjoys caring for her family. It is the cooking that she takes the most pleasure in and she operates within a weekly schedule of meals.

On Sundays, my mother takes a special pride in satiating her children’s individual cravings: Thomas prefers powder-sugar-dusted slices of French toast piled with fresh strawberries, while Philip’s sweet tooth is entertained by stacks of pancakes steeped in Vermont maple syrup. Of the three children, I get out of bed last and my mother takes her time making her final breakfast of the day while I sit across from her, as she stands in her floral-patterned apron, cheeks sporting remnants of powdered sugar.

While she cooks, my mom gossips about her tennis team captain, asks me about my school friends, and finally ventures into the realm of boys. She had a boyfriend by the time she was fourteen, a football-quarterback-Golden-Boy, and cannot fathom that, at the same age, I don’t vocalize a similar interest in Long Island’s surplus of testosterone-infused youth. Little does she know, I have been harboring a crush on the lacrosse player who lives down the street because, despite his disappointing affinity for sports, his parents were divorced when we were in fourth grade, and I took this knowledge as proof that he must somehow be “deep.”

“You know, Elizabeth,” my mother says as her fingers flicker over the heat dial on the stove, “if you have something to tell me, I hope you know you can. What I mean to say is, if you were a lesbian, for instance, I would still love you.”

I almost choked on the glass of orange juice before me, blinking up at my mother, who was smiling in such a way as to self-congratulate herself for her generosity. As I would later discover, she was not the only one who harbored this opinion, but in the moment I considered her prying to be outrageous.

When I was eight, I loved dolls. I collected a range of figures, soft-bodied and plastic, big and small, blond and brown. My favorite brand was Calico Critters and, as their name suggests, they were not human. I collected at least fifty Calico Critters, tiny families of elephants dressed in floral gowns or sets of turtle twins in tutus. The whole litter of Noah’s Arc decorated in people-clothes and riding on mini bicycles. I adored them so much that I carefully stored them in plastic bags between play-times, fearing that too much exposure to the general atmosphere would drain them of their magic.

By the time I turned ten, my mother had decided that I should be given a dollhouse to organize my toys in a more attractive manner than hoarding Ziploc bags in the corner of my bedroom. I vehemently refused her offer. I’m not sure why I was so opposed to the idea, but, while the typical ten-year-old would likely go starry-eyed at the sight of a dollhouse catalogue, I simply shook my head.

The following Christmas, I came downstairs to discover a wooden house nestled under the tree, wrapped in a delicate web of satin bows. I later learned that my dad spent several weeks building it – its roof tiles individually pieced together, a fireplace neatly carved into the living room, a spiraling staircase meticulously crawling from the front hall to the attic, which had been wallpapered as a nursery. The outside was painted a pastel pink.

My mother gave me all the outfittings of a perfect miniature home. She ordered oak dining room furniture with blue velvet cushions and an entire vintage kitchen set from FAO Schwarz, the multi-storied toy store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I came to love this dollhouse, in all its tiny upscale furnishings, but I insisted on only keeping my Calico Critterdolls in its rooms. I let the circus loose within the carefully rendered walls of play-pretend domesticity. My favorite figurine was a little lioness, who sat at a frilly vanity in the “Girl’s Bedroom” of the house, plastic hairbrush wedged within her frozen fist.

Sitting in front of my mother in our granite-finished, human-sized kitchen, I was now fourteen and a mess of awkward, believing (or, more likely, praying in “hey God, it’s me, Lizzie,” fashion) that my combination of wiry braces and bulky combat boots was not only badass, but that the addition of frilly socks and dainty golden jewelry graced me as a badass in an acceptably feminine way. I walked through the hallways of my high school with one headphone clinging to my eardrum and my long, straight brown hair swinging over half of my face. I always had a glass jar of sharpened Prismacolor pencils in one hand (I didn’t trust their expensive tips to the confines of a pencil case, and in retrospect they probably looked like makeshift weapons). I occasionally skipped school with my best friend, Allegra, to cue up for hours to attend indie concerts in grungy, too-small quarters of the Meatpacking District of New York City. Allegra was over six feet tall by the time she entered middle school, “big-boned” in frame, and ironically blond. We spent enough time together that, in retrospect, it makes sense that the hyper-Catholic, cookie-cutter atmosphere of our little suburban bubble would assume we werea lesbian couple.

I remember being taken aback by my mother’s question, as I had never thought about my sexuality beyond idly wondering if it would be socially acceptable to shag the lead singer of the Arctic Monkeys, even if he was nearing forty, and even if the opportunity never presented itself in the slightest.

For nearly all four years of high school, I was unremarkable in all aspects other than the sexual ambiguity that hung around my shoulders. As I wandered through the halls of Manhasset High, my wiry, too-tall frame, cutting cheekbones, and predilection for wearing all-black might have earned me a cursory second glance, but I was hardly a ray of beauty. I received all the male attention expected of such a creature, which ranged from minute to none.

My mom took me bikini shopping for the first time when I was sixteen, an age at which I was expected to graduate from L.L. Bean tankinis to more “feminine” wear. We celebrated the occasion with a trip to Macy’s.

I had never tried on a bikini before. I still wore baby-blue cotton bras and granny panties. I gathered a handful of colorful pieces in my arms and headed to the dressing room, my mother close behind. She waited outside while I contemplated: high-necked pink suit or floral top with a fringe? When I stepped out of the dressing room in a simple black-and-blue Puma string bikini, my mother shrieked.

“Since when do you have a waist, Elizabeth?” She exclaimed at my nearly-nude figure and motioned to the two nearby women, a preppy thirty-something-year-old in J. Crew slacks and an older woman dressed in several layers of sweaters. “Doesn’t she look incredible?” A strange tingle crept up my spine, as my body was consecrated in the eyes of two random women in the Macy’s dressing room.

It was this same year that an Italian boy and fellow Manhassetite turned his attention towards me. I entertained his crush until junior prom, after which I broke it off, apologizing that I “needed to focus on my art portfolio.” The next guy to attempt to hit on me materialized as I was sitting on the concrete floor of a basement Halloween party, plastic fangs stuck to my teeth with denture glue and gradually accumulating a pink stain from the can of Mike’s Harder Cranberry Lemonade balanced between my knees. I remember feeling incredibly self-conscious, despite the fact that he was a chubby wrestler who smelled of a mix of body odor, Cheetos and aftershave applied too generously. I spotted the blond head of a girl I knew, her long legs wrapped in thigh-highs and her narrow waist accentuated by her skin-tight dress. Her eyes were bright and carefully made up. She was too beautiful for a basement. Yet, despite the excited teens fluttering around us, we were sitting on the cold floor in the corner of the party, our backs pressed against a discarded sofa.

His name was Peter and speaking to him, in half-intoxicated half-whispers, was thrilling. Not because he was particularly attractive, or remotely popular. Quite the opposite: my friends, knowing he had a crush on me, had laughed uproariously at the news due to his terrific mediocrity. But they didn’t know how funny he was. Crouched behind that couch, I found myself laughing in snorts that propelled one of my tinged-pink plastic fangs out of my mouth and into the tin can in my palm.

I didn’t care about the fact that Peter was fat. It never occurred to me that his physical stature would contribute to his potential worth in a romantic relationship. I don’t know if I was ever attracted to him or simply enjoyed his company, but after several months of nothing more than hand-holding and the occasional kiss, he dropped me in favor of my tennis partner, who coincidentally had set us up in the first place, and was more willing to “take the next step.”

The summer of my senior year, there was a huge party on the Fourth of July. We had all just graduated from the Bullshit of Manhasset High and, hopefully, from the social hierarchy intrinsic to it. The party was lawless – swarms of seniors disrobing to jump into the vibrantly Gatorade-colored pool out back, clusters of kids around tables cluttered with Red Solo cups set up for beer pong, boys embracing bushes like long-lost companions and girls clad in Lily Pulitzer keeling over white picket fences. I overheard an argument between an extremely drunk couple regarding the question of, “what do we do when we go away to separate colleges?” The only phrase I remember with any clarity was, “you’re a fat bitch anyways!”

It was at this elite gathering that I, reeking of cheap vodka and sporting a beer stain on my blouse, was approached by the Boy of My Dreams. The lacrosse-stick-wielding child of divorce that I imagined must be my soul mate. He probably said something extremely eloquent, like “wazzgood?,” as he wandered into my line of view. I am sure that I swooned. We squatted in the corner of an adjacent closet for maybe an hour talking, as he confessed that he thought of me often in the past eight years we had gone to school together. I gladly followed him home, to a house my eyes had lingered on every time I passed by in the school bus, into a bedroom I had tried to imagine for years.

When he asked me if I wanted to have sex, I told him no and walked home. We didn’t speak after that night – until he appeared in my Instagram Direct Message inbox three years later with the line, “Whenever I see a Duke sweatshirt, I think of you.”

My response was prompt: “Bullshit.”

“Haha you’re right. Wanna chill?”

My fairytale-esque romantic streak only continued in college. There was British Tom, who fell asleep, a fully clothed stranger, in my bed, only to wake up in the middle of the night and leave a polite puddle of pee on our carpeted floor. There was British Lucas who, after a series of intimate piano duets and make-outs in his freshman common room at 2 am, decided he liked my best friend at the time better and proceeded to date her for the next two years. There was British Trenton, who attempted to enforce an abstinence from alcohol the second time we ever met by dramatically swatting every red solo cup out of my hand at a pregame. The first warning sign probably should have been when he opened with, “I’m pretty tight with Vladimir Putin.” I received incredibly emotional, essay-length text messages from Trenton for several months after the solo-cup-swatting. I think I attempted to float him a rumor that I was, in fact, a lesbian. The messages, which all went unanswered, did not cease until the school year was over. Their contents ranged from, “You up?” to, “Duke’s campus is not the same without you in my life,” to “Saw you swiping that fourth piece of cake at Marketplace today. Can I name your food baby?”

I was unimpressed.

Despite the romantic failings of my male freshman peers, a certain excitement thrummed between the cherry blossom branches of Duke’s freshman campus. Ours was a world replete with exclusive parties and post-games at secret locations. It offered a social hierarchy that I found myself on top of, entirely by chance.

I remember the morning I woke up to find the famed Candylandinvite grinning from my inbox. Every year, the Best Fraternity at Duke crowds a barn in the middle of the woods with as many (desirable) female bodies as they can get their hands on. It is considered the most exclusive party of the year. The fraternity manufactures tie-dye wristbands to dole out to their pre-selected co-partyers and do not admit additional humans to the vicinity. Freshman girls were scrambling to get their hands on the coveted rubber trinket. It was as if our entire social futures hinged on this single night. Having no interactions with the fraternity beforehand, no clue how they had procured my email to send the invite, and no idea why I had been deemed relevant, I slipped the plastic band around my wrist and an absurd tutu around my waist. I found a crowd of eager freshman girls to throw back Aristocrat shots with me before we all piled our skimpily-clad bodies into the back of an Uber. Glitter smeared across our cheekbones, plastic beads tangled around our necks, our midriffs bare and chests all but exposed.

The rest of first semester melted away in a blur of cheap vodka, fraternity emails, and dark rides on yellow school buses into the middle of a rural field, where young bodies pulsated with nervous energy and bounced off of elevated surfaces. We woke up with skidded knees, shoes caked in dirt, and fragmented memories. We didn’t realize that we were fracturing ourselves, scattering the bright-eyed pieces of our newly born cells into the darkest corners of a strange forest in a dilapidated barn. It was a bizarre rush of power, to watch wantedness stretch around my wrist. Older boys and pretty girls beaming into my email inbox and carving out my social calendar.

One night, my friends and I zipped ourselves into cocktail dresses to attend a party themed “Italian wedding.” The event had all the makings of a real wedding, with a faux-ceremony followed by a reception in a white tent strung with fairy lights. It was magical on the surface, if you ignored the small tent erected slightly to the side and reserved for snorting cocaine. Yet, so caught up in this fabricated matrimony, I took little note of the drug-doing on the sidelines.

Several hours into the event, a sophomore from the Best Fraternity at Duke, who did not belong to the fraternity hosting the party but had shown up anyway, strolled up to me. With striking green eyes and an appealing smile, he introduced himself as Levi and we began chatting. Our conversation could not have lasted more than ten minutes before he invited me to a postgame with the Best Fraternity at Duke. I shrugged, informed my friends I would be leaving, and hopped in a car headed to the Greek section of central campus.

When we arrived at the apartment, I spotted a few upperclassmen girls I knew and we chatted briefly. It was not a particularly eventful postgame and soon I found myself in Levi’s bedroom. There was a poster of Hermione on his wall, which I thought was cute and maybe meant he was a fan of Strong Female Protagonists. We talked about our mutual obsession with Harry Potter for a bit and then he started trying to take my clothes off. I laughed uncomfortably and shook my head, saying lightly, “I’m sorry, I don’t know you very well,” and pulling out my phone to call for a ride home. The next morning, I realized he had blocked me on Instagram.

Suddenly the invites from the Best Fraternity at Duke stopped appearing in my inbox and even from neighboring fraternities. Some of the girls that associated with those organizations grew less friendly as well, and I heard a rumor that Levi had told them I was asking around for their cellphone numbers to try to secure a spot in their upcoming sorority pledge classes. This had never happened, but it was the word of the Best Fraternity at Duke’s against an insignificant freshman girl.

The realization only gradually dawned on me that it was not our presence that was desired, but bodies ringing in at exactly Size Two. Stuffed with kale, pushed onto treadmills, squeezed into mini-skirts, pumped up with Svedka, sent careening into dark rooms with pulsing lights. But it was the hands, warm hands reaching out to squeeze a little too hard, tug a little too persistently, that jolted me from reverie. Suddenly I was not in possession of my own body, I had been wrapped in too many plastic wristbands, I was being suffocated. I was murmuring, no, pushing a hard chest away, both hands planted firmly, pushing, no.I didn’t realize that I would be ejected so violently, my name ricocheting between Greek-affiliated walls, strung from the cherry tree branches of our main campus quad. Whispers wandered through the caverns in my mind that housed insecurity, the empty spaces that too many shots had loosened on too many nights. Prude. Virgin. Stuck Up. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. A yes would have earned an angry ex-girlfriend’s violent disavowal from her sorority’s chapter. A no earned me a string of unfollows on Instagram. My body had been caught in the cross-fire of a system that had existed before I walked onto campus and that will linger after I graduate.

In the spring of my sophomore year, I boarded a plane to Los Angeles to participate in Duke in LA. I would spend a semester living and studying at the University of Southern California while working as a creative development intern at NBC.

I discovered that Los Angeles exists in striations and gradations. Layers of silt compounded, grass creeping over soil, reaching up into the sky. The city is a winding and expansive maze, impossible to understand from the fringes. I only started to grasp its machinations, its patterns, its intricately constructed and diligently maintained order, once I had spent several weeks immersed in its midst.

I lived downtown, in university housing, among the red-solo-cup-littered hallways of the freshmen. They rode skateboards to class and wore sunglasses too big for their faces. Their place of worship was, of course, Greek row, a concrete strip of street sporting houses altogether too nice for the keg-stands and frat bunks that defined them. The Village, a cluster of coffee shops and organic eateries, had been recently erected around the corner and catered to any need a university student could possibly have. Red-bricked roads invited the culinary-capable to fill their baskets at Trader Joe’s, while shaded cobblestones called those with deeper pockets to throw twenty dollar bills at hemp-milk acai bowls. The community was enclosed and self-sufficient. Palm-treed pathways led to high-ceilinged lecture halls. Students ate, drank, slept, studied, partied, lounged, gossiped, comedy-sketched, cheer-leaded, tail-gated, dirty-rushed their way through the days. All the while never leaving the comfort of the five-mile radius of their bountiful and lavish campus. A vacation resort that happened to be equipped with a four-year degree program. The quintessence of (expensive) convenience.

Despite this, I was acutely aware of the expansive city existing beyond the bounds of campus security. Seeking to elude the well-worn Greek rhythms, I downloaded Tinder.

As a native New Yorker, the idea that beautiful people band together was not foreign to me. The streets of Manhattan teem with long-legged probably-models showcasing all the latest fashions on their supple limbs. In Manhattan, these clusters of walking perfection still turned heads. Manhattan is a mixed bag of alternative types grappling for artistic fame, crisply-clothed bankers making declarative statements into their mobile earpieces, and ordinary people.

In Los Angeles, my Tinder feed was flooded by mildly successful actresses and models with the washboard abs and distinguished jawlines to back their claims. Few had finished university. It was entirely possible to make a living simply marketing your bone structure on billboards and your preference of protein powder on Instagram.

After filtering through the frat boys loitering in the campus radius, I stumbled upon a series of black and white images of a leanly muscled man with floppy blond hair and incredible cheek bones. He had “super liked” me, which lead me immediately to believe he must be a cat fish. What interest would he have in a Duke student with a few crappy pictures of her highlighted head? I skeptically swiped right anyways.

He sparked a conversation immediately: “How are you, love?” I thought it odd that he referred to me that way, but quickly wrote it off as a European thing. His bio labeled him Italian and Spanish and his name was Mateo. He told me he had grown up in Silver Lake, attending an expensive French prep school in the area. He was not a particularly gifted conversationalist, but I was hooked enough on the superficial aspects of him that I agreed to meet up in the coming week.

The next Tuesday was my birthday and the collection of companions I had in LA – roommates, fellow Duke students, and some friends at USC – assembled at one of our favorite rooftop spots, Perch, for dinner and drinks. It was only a Tuesday night so, when one of my USC friends offered up the option of clubbing with her promoter later in the night, I dismissed it. But then we found ourselves ordering cocktail after cocktail. Evidently our waiter had found it amusing when a group of eight barely-twenty-something girls offered up IDs from eight different states nowhere nearby. He laughed when one of my friends, after handing him a Tennessee ID, proceeded to tell him she still went to university in her home state of North Carolina. He had no objection to serving us, a group of skimpily clad and overly giggly girls, and we had no objection to ordering.

It was in this manner that we came to the decision that we should go out. Even though the option of clubbing had initially sounded unappealing - the associated promoter was nearing forty and incredibly creepy - we found ourselves with fewer objections as midnight rolled around. I whipped out my phone, pulled up Tinder, and asked Mateo what he was up to for the night.

He met me at the club, 1OAK, although I would later tell my friends we just happened to bump into each other, as I was too embarrassed to admit that I had downloaded an app designed for meeting people. I found out that, even though he was well over 6’5” and impressively muscled, he was only 19 and he still lived with his parents. This fact made him less appealing, less mysterious, and as I departed the club, the taste of disappointment comingled with cranberry vodkas at the back of my throat.

It was for this reason that, when he asked me to attend an art opening with him and his friends the next week, I politely declined in favor of – yet another – frat party. But as I was jostled from side to side by bodies reeking of beer and struggling to stand, I found myself constantly checking my phone. My heart jumped when, a few hours later, I received a message from Mateo asking me to meet him at Hyde, an upscale lounge in West Hollywood. I quickly said goodbye to my friends and, in my muddy sneakers and $6 tropical T-shirt I had purchased from Forever 21 in honor of the “Island” theme this particular frat party had entertained, tipsily set off in an Uber.

When I arrived at the venue, I was greeted not only by Mateo’s dimples a foot above my head, but by the entire cast of Shamelesslaughing and leaning into a corner. I had binge-watched the entire show not a month before and had to stifle a gasp at seeing the TV personas materialized right before my ratty Converse. What was this world I had half-accidentally, half-drunkenly Swiped and stumbled my way into?

The next few months were an explosion of clubs and celebrity-spottings. I found myself immersed in a crowd of insanely beautiful people who seemed to party for a living. There was a different club for every night of the week, followed by an after-party hosted by the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio that extended until the morning (or maybe longer – the latest I ever left was 10 a.m., but the party was still very much in full swing when I departed). I found myself existing in cycling states of drunk and hungover, while all the while high on the fast-paced and fame-ridden nature of our partying rhythms.

One night, as we were pregaming around 9 pm in typical routine, Mateo casually asked, “Do you eat?”

I blinked up at him, stuttering, “...Yes?”

He shrugged, stating simply, “Never hurts to ask. If you want to come to a dinner tomorrow night, let me know.”

The next evening, I received a text inviting me to Toca Madera, a Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood, for 8 pm. Unsure of where the night would take us, I arrived dressed in the usual clubbing fare, a lacy blue ensemble tucked into a tight black skirt. I quickly spotted the tall blond head of Mateo and was ushered over to a table surrounded almost entirely by girls.

The restaurant was beautiful, with red leather booths sequestered in tall-windowed corners. Polished oak floors reflected the soft light emanating from art deco chandeliers. The table sported an array of small plates with delicately arranged food. Slices of waygu steak steeped in pools of red wine. Fried calamari dipped in jalapeno-cilantro sauce and garnished with carefully diced pineapple. Innumerable bowls of guacamole decorated in pomegranate seeds.

I eagerly reached for a plate, before realizing that no one was eating. Thin elbows remained frozen on the outskirts of the table as long, painted fingers nursed cocktails that contained more tequila than anything else. Mateo and the only other guy at the table out of twenty people chuckled, piling their own plates with food while calling the doe-eyed girls, “skinny legends.” I couldn’t tell if they were mocking the group or applauding them for their refusal to eat.

As we filed into the club that night, one girl after the other, carefully staggered in terms of attractiveness, I became cognizant that we were regarded as livestock. Anonymous, replaceable, wanted only for our meat (or lack thereof). As it would later be explained to me, promoters like Mateo made a profit by bringing girls into clubs every night. The manager would wander through the rows of tables and take note of the caliber of female faces smiling up at him, while mentally measuring the width of our waists. A promoter moved up the clubbing hierarchy by elevating the average attractiveness of his fellow partiers. Intrinsic to each of our bodies was a quantifiable worth. It fluctuated according to the number on the weight scale or the presence of a “k” on an Instagram followers page. 3.4k? 11.9k? 200.7k could bring in bigger bucks, better gigs, trendier parties. Score.

On Saint Patrick’s Day, I brought my roommates along to a daytime party that Mateo was DJ-ing (it is rare to meet a man in Los Angeles who does not harbor a side-hobby of mixing music). As we stood at a rooftop bar before his performance, conversing with a group of musicians and their posse of either girlfriends or fans, Mateo suddenly reached across the table, gripped my chin, and shoved my face sideways. He rubbed his thumb harshly along my jawline, a spot where I often forget to blend my comparatively tan concealer into my fair skin tone, and muttered, “this is bad.” I felt my face redden as the group raised their eyebrows. My skin burned where his fingers had assailed me. I decided that would be the last time I went out with Mateo.

Promoters like Mateo make a living selling strung-out bodies to the silt of the city, solidifying our positions within the ridges of the infamous La La land and prefiguring themselves at the top, next to the wooden Hollywood letters that dance along the hilltops.

I retreated to the college bars of USC, determined to avoid both the stale hierarchy of Greek life and the incessant noise of the West Hollywood club scene. It was there that one night, surrounded by my friends and on a quest to demonstrate I do not need a boy, that I bumped into my first “real” boyfriend.

He was French Italian, as echoed in his name: Matthieu Luigi Gavaudan. He was a year out of university, where he had studied computer science at Columbia and afterwards settled in New York, and on a trip with his friends that happened to align with my spring break. He is six three, with sharp cheekbones and soft brown eyes, and is acutely horrible at flirting. Within our brief conversation, I learned that his family lives in London, he is the oldest of four siblings and he speaks four languages. My interest was piqued. We exchanged numbers and made a vague plan to meet up when I returned to New York that summer, a plan that I never believed would actually come to fruition, until an iMessage arrived in my inbox precisely two months later inviting me to dinner in the city.

He was wearing all black and I had nervously curled my hair. We hadn’t been sitting for five minutes before the waiters began encouraging us to get up and dance along to the live Cuban music. Two men firing rapid French at one another were seated a table over from us and pointed a camera in our direction. Matthieu began politely arguing with the camera-holder in their shared tongue, until finally he lowered his lens and pushed a business card across the table. The encounter was slightly creepy, but exhilarating, as I glanced down at the card and saw that beneath his name was written, Elle Magazine.

We went to a club later that night and the bouncer didn’t card us, a technicality that my underage ID appreciated greatly. The rest of the summer unfolded in rapid succession – daytime parties with exotic and interesting people, European DJs at hipster venues in Brooklyn, late-night Korean BBQ runs, clubs that sported baby grand pianos and winding staircases and grandiose chandeliers and gritty graffiti and even an indoor hot tub. His apartment had a private rooftop and we lay on pillows beneath the winding lights and stared up at a sky empty of stars. He told me he loved me this way, our pinkies grazing, glasses of white wine sweating between us.

He accumulated his affection by collecting the tiniest of details. Do you notice yourself singing out loud? That’s how I know you’re in a good mood. Did you realize you shimmy your shoulders when you’re ready to eat? And you roll up on the balls of your feet when you’re excited or impatient. The only reason I agree to stand in lines is to look down at you like that, all eager and tensed for action. I love the little noise you make when you’re sleepy. I love nudging you awake in the morning. I love you.

He appreciated these minute manifestations of physical habit, but he didn’t appreciate everything about me as a girlfriend. I’ve never considered myself particularly culinary-inclined, but I believe one of the most universal ways to express love is through food. So when I had a love to show of my own I seared it into stirfry. Mashed it into guacamole for fajitas. Scrambled it into a breakfast burrito. I was working as a camp counselor on Long Island at the time, but I lugged meals in a cooler bag on my shoulder to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. An hour-and-a-half trip, consisting of two Ubers and a train ride, made half-exhausted after working eight-to-five in the sun commandeering nine-year-olds, but a trip I made several times a week anyways. To bring groceries and a recipe. Because I had someone to love and I wanted to feed him.

I remember one evening I stashed omelet ingredients and pancake batter underneath the typical dinner-time-fodder and snuck them into his fridge when he wasn’t looking. The next morning while he was sleeping (he was nearly nocturnal, so it wasn’t difficult to creep out of bed before he woke), I chopped fruit and diced onions and peeled avocados. Crisped potatoes and browned pancakes and sizzled eggs. He came downstairs, roused by the smell of brewing breakfast, and wiping his eyes in bewilderment, asked, “What kind of shit takeout did you order that you have to reheat it in pans?” I laughed at his confusion and handed him a plate. He was an utter stranger to the kitchen.

As a European, he remarked openly about what he viewed as a widespread American laziness that contributed to obesity. As much as he remarked that he loved my figure at 5’9” and 125 pounds, he also loved to pinch the side of my stomach and pitch the question, “Have you ever thought what working out three hours a day could do to your body? Don’t you think you could look like the Victoria’s Secret models if you did?” He discussed his propensity for dating models, tossing names and photos my way, chuckling that it was my blond hair and long legs that had caught his attention all those months before in the crowded bar in Los Angeles. He pointed out a birthmark he took fault with and told me my boobs were slightly lopsided. He told me I was dressed like a grandmother when I went to meet his parents, and he showed up three hours late to meet mine.

I collected these moments and stashed them in a glass jar in the back of my brain. Vividly colored memories, with pointed tips. Lethal weapons. They would not spill out, in all their brightly-hued violence, until months later, as we faced each other on the highest floor of a skyscraper, looking out at the endless buildings piercing the sky with their stubborn heights. I had just returned from a semester abroad in London and we had attempted to straddle an international distance and a five hour time difference. We had a three-week overlap in New York over Christmas, but he would be on vacation in Mexico with his family for two of them. I changed my flight to surprise him early and he told me had been planning to spend the weekend playing video games with his friends. It would be selfish for me to ask him to change those plans.

It was a simple breakup. No red solo cups thrown, no puddles of urine left in its wake. He gave me the gift of finally convincing my mother I was straight and I gave him free breakfast. He didn’t even block me on Instagram.

A few months before, I had gone to a rooftop party with his friends. Everyone in attendance had graduated from college already (except me), but the party still enforced a strict theme: Ibiza.

Even though it was September and I had already spent a summer hanging out with Matthieu’s friends, I didn’t know anyone when I arrived. These were his “French friends,” I assumed people he had known before moving to America. Matthieu disappeared within the first ten minutes of arrival and I was forced to mingle solo. I was wearing a white romper – properly feminine, appropriately in theme, slightly flirtatious in length, but not too scandalous. Perfect arm-candy attire.

I waded through a crowd of strangers, attempting to drown social anxiety in my mimosa, and was soon approached by a man – blond, fairly attractive, and tall. He had kind green eyes that seemed somehow familiar. We chatted politely and I soon discovered he hailed from London, the city in which I would be spending a semester abroad within a matter of weeks. As he offered to introduce me to some of his friends who still live there, I suppose a look of enthusiasm invaded my features. I suddenly felt a hand on the small of my back and, before I had time to process what was happening, I felt a pair of lips on mine.

Matthieu reached his hand out to introduce himself to the Londoner. My lips burned where he had touched them. He might as well have reached a hand out to smear the concealer between my jawline and my neck. Or asked me to show him my wristband. It was almost as if he had lifted a leg and showered me in testosterone and urine, a dog marking his territory. His eyes on my skin reassured me that I exist, but the anger behind his mahogany gaze let me know that I could only exist in a very specific way on that rooftop. This was not the kind of party where my body was open for the taking.

A month after I broke up with him, my birthday rolled around again. Matthieu informed me that he had sent me “a little something” at two am the night before.

My fingers trembled as they ripped at the plastic of the packaging and the smell of him immediately invaded my nostrils. Inside was one of his old T-shirts, doused in his cologne. I could imagine him getting off to the thought I would happily slip this article of my past over my shoulders and around my neck. I laughed audibly. Psycho.I imagined delivering a bouquet of sharpened Prismacolor pencils to his doorstep. Tout mon amour – Lizzie.