When I was younger my mom called me Skinny Minnie. I’m not sure what she meant by this or why she called me it, but I know that I was confused. Even at a young age, I thought it was weird to have a nickname revolving around my weight -- especially because I wasn’t even particularly skinny; I was completely average.

All the colors I most cherish drifted by as I floated down the Grand Canal. Rich but worn shades of orange, pink, golden yellow and blues meandered by, one after another.

I’m always sweating. I get on the subway—I’m sweating. I clock in at work—I’m sweating. I’m asking the server where the bathroom is—and woohoo, I’m sweating.

Suddenly desperate to push beyond yourself, you commit to give back in some way in-between all the blood donations. A catalyst to thrust you from your daily grind.

You want to return to the womb. Maybe then everything will be quiet and safe again. But of course, you think about the children. The people, all of them, alone in their homes and schools and prisons and countries.

This was where my family had recently settled after we became refugees for a second time during the 1974 war. On the 13th, one day before I departed for the US for my higher education under a private sponsorship, I packed my suitcase. Then, I carefully selected a few photographs of my family and of myself to take with me to America. The same day I was packing, my mother gave me a few gifts. These gifts became my most valued possessions, and I am proud to say I still have them.

In Starvation Mode, all I thought or dreamt about was food, even though eating terrified me more than anything. I didn’t care about anyone or anything except losing weight. It was like the line between human and animal had become so thin it collapsed. I was gone. I was starving. I was addicted to starving myself. I went feral for a little while.

I began losing my eyesight when I was three – a result of poor genetics and squinting at the television too often. My sight worsened until I was nineteen; by then, I was nearly legally blind and opted to have my vision corrected through surgery. Until that point, losing my eyesight afforded me both a gift and a curse – the gift of insight and the curse of knowledge. I saw the world in layers of truths and half-truths, of what people thought they knew and what actually happened behind closed doors.

I was a tall, skinny blond, a migrant from a sorority house in Texas, looking younger than my twenty-two years when I moved to Aspen, Colorado. The family of my long-time boyfriend had included me on their ski vacations for several holiday seasons, so when I dropped out of college in my senior year it was the only place I knew to go.

“Thirty-five and still alive.”

“Thirty-six and just won’t quit.”

“Thirty-seven and not yet in Heaven.”

Each year, before watching her children blow out her birthday candles, my mother coins a new tagline to affirm her survival despite increasingly improbable odds. She is terminally ill. Multiple Sclerosis and resultant lung failure.

Like many eccentric children, I had often wished I could be afflicted with some kind of physical ailment, imperfection or secret status—something that would make me unique and special.

Another woman in the shop, an older woman—bleach-blonde hair, worn face—regards me: “You look great, honey.”

I had longed for this moment—for decades, really. Ever since age thirteen, when I first began throwing away my school lunches and going to soccer practice, doing suicides—up and down the field, up and down the field, touch the goal line once again—on an empty stomach.

I was not raped by someone you know. Just a few days after my fifteenth birthday I was raped by a boy who was scared of ghosts and hung a tin cross on his wall. When I was raped it felt like drowning. I could not breathe. My body twisted in ways I was not in control of, and in the fleeting moments when I realized and re-realized what was happening to me I gasped for air. I cried.

They’re in a black plastic box, bottom drawer, right side of the IKEA dresser. When I open the case I discover the tiny bottle of oil meant to keep the blade from rusting has spilled. It takes a few minutes to wipe all the different attachments clean, but that gives me time to contemplate. Am I sure? Do I really want to do this?

The Sunday after Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel called me to say that, by law, they could not keep her ashes any longer, I marched into parish office of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and demanded of the receptionist, “How does one become Catholic?” I was directed to a Filipino woman, a parishioner-catechist, who smirked at me with detached affection, just like my mother used to. She told me her name was Grace, to which I replied, “well, that’s a good sign.”

A warm-hearted pack rat through and through, I knew she probably hadn’t donated the boxes in my former bedroom, nicknamed the hobbit hole. (Much like Paul was the Walrus, I am the Hobbit.) Crammed with what I kindly labeled childhood trauma — lighten the truth with a little humor, no? — the boxes held SAT prep books and enough plaid uniform skirts to choke not only the horse, but the whole Kentucky Derby.

I sat on the floor in Medusa’s interview room, taking the submissive posture my coworker had shown me a few hours earlier: kneeling with my legs spread apart, hands on my thighs, palms turned upward. I was dressed in a tiny plaid skirt no actual schoolgirl would wear, a white crop top, and a pink dog collar. When I’d interviewed for the position of “professional submissive” a week earlier, the manager had emphasized that submissives must wear collars at all times, and I didn’t have the money or courage to step into a fetish store and buy a real one. So here I was in a scratchy, cheap band of fabric with a bulky plastic buckle, its weight around my neck a reminder that I didn’t belong here.

It’s day thirteen of my Coronavirus quarantine, I got up at eleven, drank two mug fulls of espresso, and I’m sitting in my childhood room in Montecchio, Italy, writing in a little black notebook, blank except for a handful of pages. The notes are a few years old and they are all about him—they are embarrassingly titled “My You”—but most importantly they are about her, the girl who was me, the girl who didn’t think she would survive heartbreak, humiliation and abandonment.

She was dead before I met her so I’m not sure how much of our meeting I should believe. I was at the deli counter at Kroger when she found me, far away at the crossroads of Main and Court streets in Luray, Virginia, at what used to be the second stoplight in town. She introduced herself as Rosebud (which should have been my first clue), and she winked as she said, but you can call me Rosie, and I knew right then and there that I’d believe anything she had to say.

That morning, I’m driving home from a doctor’s checkup in the next town over, nose of the car pointed east, toward the ridge of the Oakland hills, its craggy hillside densely studded with houses and thickets of trees. The wind is blowing from the wrong direction, gusting in from the hot, interior valley instead of the sea, forcing me to pull the steering wheel to the left every few seconds, correcting my course. It is one of those weather days in California, critical fire danger, when our bodies intuitively thread themselves a bit tighter.