I scan my brain hard for these memories that should, I guess, be there, but the life I think of as my own is all I find.

I go back over to the unfamiliar phone and open the photos app.

Oh God.

There are answers, all right.

It’s a treasure trove of answers that pose more questions. There’s a selfie of me that I never took holding up a cup of hot chocolate I don’t remember drinking. There are several pictures of food in nice, unfamiliar restaurants. A frankly staggering number of pictures of Maureen. There are pictures of me and Kiera together and of Kiera by herself.

The answers being, Oh, this is what this life looks like. And the questions all being along the lines of, What the fuck is going on and who are these people?

I press Play on a video of Kiera.

It starts and I hear my own voice say, “Okay, go.”

Kiera skewers a sausage with her fork, takes a bite, and then says, “Please date me, I’m a grand time.”

I hear myself burst into laughter and say, “You can’t say please date me, you psycho!”

“It’s a dating app, that’s the whole point!”

I make a pfft sound, and then it stops.

It reminds me so much of the video of me and Aimee that I’d unearthed before leaving LA. Two friends having an embarrassing, funny, fun time and making fools of themselves.

It is undeniably my voice. These selfies are of me. The little freckle on my cheekbone and slightly crooked gumline above my right lateral incisor—I know it’s called exactly that because I recently had an appointment with an oral surgeon to discuss correcting it.

It’s me in these photos. It’s also like me to take pictures of my drinks and my food, to record people I like, and it was my first thought as I watched it to think, “You can’t say please date me, that’s psycho,” even before hearing my own voice say it.

I tap on the Favorites album, feeling a little breathless.

There’s a picture of me and Cillian. We’re sitting at a picnic table, a late-afternoon golden sun shining on us. I have my smiling mouth open and a hand up, and I can read myself well enough to know that I’m in a good mood but joke-mad, insisting something to him. He is holding a finger up, as if he’s going to press it against my lips to tell me to be quiet. But he looks happy too, amused by me, tolerant and patient. I spread my fingers apart on the screen to zoom into the photo and I see a look in his eyes I’ve never seen in someone who was looking at me. My unfiltered, not-over-considered thought is that that guy looks like he is desperately, madly in love with that girl.