I look more like those old photos of my mom every day. Some things have happened. I made some things happen. Everything always happens all at once. “We become the people we need to be in order to finish the book.” One of those things I wrote down, thinking I’d remember the reference and promptly forgot. But what book am I finishing?

I started fucking C. Well, I fucked him once, but it will probably happen again. He says I remind him of someone else. He says a lot of things when I’m sleepy afterward. He’s sort of sad, this boy, at least right now, when I happen to know him, sort of drifting with a lot of passions that burn out too quickly. He talks too much but he’s funny and weird. He said, “Remember me among your lovers.” I didn’t tell him he was the first new one, in fact I told him he wasn’t.

It’s not that anything is better with C. It’s just that everything is new.

I mean, there was something like five hours’ worth of sex. Not just sex, but everything that goes with it. It wasn’t that, though, not exactly, though lips chapped from kissing was nice, chin red from his stubble. It was smoking in the hallway—him in pajamas, me in my dress. It was neighbors arriving home from the movies, from somewhere, dinner, dressed nice and climbing up six flights of stairs, out of breath, telling C, “Don’t worry about it, we’re about to do the same thing.”

And then C saying, “We’re adults, you know?” in the middle of one of his weed-induced monologues. Adults. Adults. Adults.

“I feel more like I’m sixteen than I have in a while.” I shouldn’t have said it, but I wanted to feel like that one time I sneaked out of the house in Southampton when M tapped on my window. The window tap, the last resort when there were only landlines and a phone call at one A.M. would wake up Dad. That one time when I sat a little cold on the beach and told M, “I don’t want to date anyone anymore, I’ll just make out with all of my friends.”

C’s reaction: a little smile, a little side-eyed bitterness. Everyone knows the situation. It’s not like I said I love you. It wouldn’t be true, not really, maybe in one sense. A temporary sense. Then again, everything is temporary. What does time have to do with love?