I’m allotting two hundred calories for cheese when I hear knocking, pounding, heavy enough to shake the hotel fire door. I jerk upright and imagine men in sunglasses, men in masks, faceless men sent to silence me. I wipe fast, slide against the wall, put my eye to the keyhole. I see nothing and open the door a crack, then all the way. The vision was overblown. The hall is empty. The Vicodin has kicked in.

Sometimes when it goes to work, when it mixes with AMPs or benzos or whatever else, I see things, hear things, that aren’t really there. A common side effect, like chemical drip or dry mouth. And worth it, to arrive in that permissive, powerful place I have always wanted to inhabit. Drugs erase time, age, mistakes; drugs don’t work the way they used to. But they’re better than nothing, the closest thing I’ve got now to what Instagram once promised.

I close the door, turn, un-turn, re-turn the bolt to make certain it’s locked. I swing the safety latch, look again through the peephole, then return to the bathroom: my pill bottles and makeup and serums, the discarded bathing suit bottoms I didn’t bother to pick up, the mirror I shouldn’t face. I don’t need to look to know I’m a mess. I bend down, scoop up the suit, hang it on the door handle, and turn to catch my reflection, pretty and pulled together. I lean toward the glass, make a kiss face and the reflection changes. I step back. “Don’t start with this,” I say aloud, though it’s too late. Before my eyes, my face becomes a landslide, running downhill. There’s filler under the skin, collected in the troughs. And still it falls. Doesn’t it? I can’t trust what I see, can never know what about me is real. Which laser facial designed to smooth fine lines and sun damage burned white ridges into my chin? I see them if I squint, don’t I? Which dermal filler, and how much of it, migrated from my marionette lines and changed the mobility of my mouth? It slopes sadly now, incapable of smiling. And who botched my first nose job, who botched my second? Which strip-mall med spa, which injector, aesthetician, plastic surgeon—and there have been many—left a lip lift scar in the middle of my face?

My phone is by the toilet where I left it. I open the camera, take a selfie and pinch the screen to see myself, distorted, a Picasso muse, every flaw a drama. Is this how I really look? I often spend hours trying to know for certain. I press the shutter again, again, again, then step back and pinch the ugly selfies I just shot, parsing the distortion of the lens from past procedures, the passing of time.