Karilyn and I are going to make our way to Manhattan at some undefinable point in time; sometime, I believe, in between tomorrow and a dream. We'll have a loft apartment with glassy wooden floors and airy windows to let the horizon in, walls painted outlandishly with hot pink and dark red (black and white tile in the kitchen, like at 1950's diner). Marilyn and Audrey, raw colours next to the splashes of the spectrum Van Gogh and Picasso delighted in. Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, e.e. cummings consorting with Amy Lowell on the bookshelf, Breakfast at Tiffanys and Gentleman Prefer Blondes by the telly. She writes for Vogue-- I freelance, my last short story about a photographer in San Fransisco. A vintage clothing shop in SoHo-- Kar runs, I do PR, black-and-white photographs next to dashes of publicity in the New York Times. Poetry readings at coffeehouses, hours spent in Saks Fifth Avenue, drinking Caramel Hot Cider and Vanilla Creme from Starbucks. Flirting with eligible bachelors (a twentieth century term if ever heard) over flutes of bubbly, tango dancing in a ruffled red dress and heels trimmed with rhinestones-- because really, someone's got to buy the pastries and the diamonds.

I'll know when I meet you, but not for all the usual reasons. It won't be because your first kiss will be a little hesitant, and taste like cotton candy on a summer afternoon. The snowflakes, hushed and silvery outside, can't lend secrets told. I'll just know, know because at that moment, you are thinking that here is the same girl who climbed in the hollow between the pine boughs to sweep up sweet-smelling needles and brush off knobby rocks. Here she is, the only other person who hates to cut apart magazines for glossy pictures and yet loves to piece them together, one scissored edge next to another. I'll know, because you love all the same Broadway songs, and are smitten, hopelessly, with glam rock and glitter. You buy Chinese takeout for the lemon chicken, the crisp syrupy taste of sweet and sour gliding over your tongue. When you're tired, you like peppermint tea and lavendar-scented cushions. Oscar Wilde on Tuesdays, Jane Austen on Friday, vanilla because it's like London, chocolate because it's Paris.

There are days like these I think I've never been so happy as this. That I don't need flowers in a crystal sheath to tell me that I am loved, or the dull sparkle of mirrors to remind me that my face is striking. I can listen to glam rock during study time, and mouth the lyrics to the library, waving my hands in a funny little impromptu expression of joy. I put on too much red lipstick one day, and recite Tennyson on my way to Trigonometry the next.

I could go and kiss someone, or buy a thirty-cent peppermint stick. I am eighteen, and so in love with life that it hurts.

If I was someone else. Someone with pale gold hair streaming on a white pillow. Someone without ink stains on their fingertips or crumpled papers on the their floor.

If there was another girl tucked in my skin, waking up in my bed, wearing my black turtleneck, staring down at chipped nails, wondering, wondering, wondering-- then I could be you.

You don’t feel alone, do you?