“No way to stop time, but a good idea to try.” This is what I tell my customers, women who come to see me in the black and white striped store where I wait for them.

I wait among the serums and sheet masks and red-light wands; the makeup named after Instagram filters I pat over eye bags and nasolabial folds.

“Not anti-aging, graceful aging,” I say, and load women’s shopping baskets with promises of transformation, erasure, control. Empty promises, I’ve always thought, illusory. The women shouldn’t trust me. Even as a child, I believed the solution to age and plainness was to transform the body itself, not cover it; to shrink or expand as needed through starvation, exercise, the Adderall girls in my high school took to stay satiated and small, the injectables and surgery that came later. I never bought into the surface stuff: serums, creams, makeups. The only meaningful change comes from within, I still believe that.

But now, every answer, every solution, contradicts. I read recently that long-term benzo use, opioid abuse, leads to early dementia, perpetual forgetting. I read that Botox weakens the forehead; when it wears off, you look older than ever. I read that a frozen face has been proven to a make a woman happier than an expressive one; she looks in the mirror, sees less trouble, and becomes it. Before I left Texas, Houston, work, to come here, spring rains had started, torrential storms rising up out of nowhere, then gone again, the world washed and reeling in their wake. But the sky reverts to normal, like it has forgotten its rage. Like it never felt anything at all.

This is the best I can hope for, a clean slate before the next storm, next tragedy, next decade. My expectations are realistic. Realistic expectations are important for anyone contemplating cosmetic surgery. It’s the people who want to look like someone else entirely—Kendall, Kylie, a Siamese cat—that get into trouble. I just want to look like myself, my true self, stripped of time and the violence of past mistakes.

So I’m here, in Los Angeles again, the only city in the world with Aesthetica™, performed only by Dr. Perrault, the only surgeon capable of undoing, in a single procedure, every procedure that came before. For now, anyway. I have read that infection rates are worse than reported, read the FDA is investigating Aesthetica™ and will pull it from the market any day. Because patients have suffered autoimmune responses, their body rising up to reject their new face; patients have suffered infection within the first twenty-four hours, the result of contaminated flesh, sepsis. There have been deformities. “Aesthetica™ erases everything,” Dr. Perrault said during our virtual consult, “though as with any surgery there’s risk involved.” As if he had to say it. I booked the procedure then and there. I entwined myself, willingly, in a fast dance with death.