As I run, the flesh falls off my bones. Everything extra is burned away.

Spare, dense. Bones. Remember?

Unembellished, honest. Lighter, heavy.

I feel the change more than I see it. I sense the small shifts in fate with the sloughing of fat. In the mirror, I still see the bump on a nose, the flappy-ness of an earlobe and hair that grows too fast. But I feel the turn of heads and the lingering of looks. I accept fresh deference with barely concealed disdain, but I can’t say I don’t want it.

I get a measure of beauty and I pay for it with a measure of tragedy—lost, the irretrievable ability to use my body to my fill, to be okay with the fact that it is dying.

(And I think maybe the answer had it all wrong. Maybe the whispered truth was just a disguised lie. That, yes, it certainly isn’t free, it isn’t luck or destiny that has brought you this, these perfect lines and fathoms-deep eyes. Somehow, somewhere along the way, you have paid the price and you have been killed, maimed, killed. You have been broken by someone and you have had something taken from you. It doesn’t come for free. You pay for it. If there is beauty on your face, there has been blood in your hands.)

I looked at the picture and I could feel the walls. Pitted, like pockmarked skin, like smooth but pockmarked skin, the face of the walls. The carpets below were synthetic, scratchy. And it was always cold because it was always 5 a.m. and we had just started actually getting some studying done an hour ago. The cold pizzas and cold cookies lay strewn between the laptops and cords and Chipotle cups and notebooks. Not too many text books because it was a state school and most people were too poor or too cheap to buy them.

I looked at the picture and I could feel the concrete beneath my feet. I could feel the grass off to the side. The weight of the buildings that sat solidly around. The walk to class, the walk to biddable Austen and forbidden Rushdie, to magical Borges and inscrutable Joyce. The walk to chicken salad sandwich and Cherry pop at lunch, then a sizzling cigarette in the cold wind. The walk back home, away from biddable Austen and forbidden Rushdie, away from magical Borges and valiantly trying to scrute Joyce.

I looked at Nicole and fairies lit up a line down my face.

I looked at it all, and I remembered it all, and I knew, I knew I could never forget any of it. What I perhaps did not know was that there is a fine line, a silver-spun tightrope, between not forgetting and not being able to let go. A Gatsby baby, after all, beating against the current as though the inevitable had come as a surprise.