I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

I am 19 and I have moon-pale skin and I have only been in love 0.5 times. The .5 accounts for my high school boyfriend, who bristled at the term “boyfriend” and whose palm sweated profusely when we held hands. I do not think he–or any of them, really–should count for a whole point, even if we lost our virginity to them or cried our first heartbreak tears over them or got spontaneous, outrageous haircuts just to regain some form of agency after they broke up with us.

I am 19 and I live on the corner of Broome and Centre in SoHo, and I wake up every morning to a five-story ad of a woman in gigantic Prada sunglasses. I have a blog that no one reads; I stay in a lot smoking weed and watching Six Feet Under; I wear very short dresses and still write poetry, earnestly. In the Spring, my stepmother gets pregnant and miscarries. My father tells me to stop writing about sex on my blog and I make him promise not to read it anymore. He doesn’t listen. I see Sonicvision at the Natural History Museum’s planetarium three times in four months and go kayaking on the Hudson. I get a Gawker commenter handle but am too intimidated to use it. I am selective about who is allowed to touch me, who deserves to peel my clothes off. I learn the terms “hetero-normative” and “pro-sex feminism.” At home in Pennsylvania, I sneak Klonopin from the medicine cabinet to help court sleep. Otherwise I wake up wheezing, clutching my chest, unsure of where I am.

I am 20 and I have chalk-pale skin and I have been in love 1.5 times. We have sex in Murray Hill, we have sex in SoHo; we have sex in Virginia and Pennsylvania and London. We write notes in the margins of each other’s poetry: “This is self-indulgent,” “Is this one about me?” We take our shoes off and dance around to Bruce Springsteen. In November, in the middle of the night, he bolts upright and screams and I have to smack him hard across the face to wake him up. I do not sleep soundly beside a man again for two years. I have a blog that some people read. I write an article for New York Magazine and then do not leave my room for a week. My friends come over and I cry because I am embarrassed. Someone on the Internet calls me “Miss Bangs and Eyeliner” and is not inaccurate. I take a class called “Women and the Media.” I relate to Claire Fisher, Effy Stonem, Angela Chase. In the Spring, my stepmother gets pregnant again and miscarries again. I think a lot about killing myself. I fly to London for my birthday and for the first time a boy tells me he loves me. I take a pregnancy test in the bathroom of my work study office; it’s negative. A few days later, without much explanation except that we are young and scared and very far from one another, he breaks up with me over Gchat.

I am still 20 and I have still only been in love 1.5 times but now I live in Paris. I have a lot of trouble pronouncing “Gruyere” and “Luxembourg.” I smoke cigarettes on a balcony and our downstairs neighbor writes us a note: “Mon balcon n’est pas un cendrier!” — my balcony is not an ashtray. A black man wins the American presidency, and suddenly Parisians aren’t as mean to me anymore. I get drunk on cheap champagne and sing in front of a crowd of rowdy Europeans on the lip of the Seine. I spend a lot of time in the English bookstore and read several works by Fitzgerald. I do not have a TV or the Internet in my apartment so all I do is read. I go to Amsterdam and get so stoned I don’t remember going to the Van Gogh Museum until I find my ticket stub three weeks later. I throw up in the Barcelona airport and I marvel at the communist echoes in Prague. I meet a British doctor who does things like tie me to the headboard. Someone in America falls out of love with me while someone else falls headfirst right in. I smoke Gauloises instead of Marlboro Lights. I spend half of my budget on lingerie and screw-cap wine. The only person who mails me letters is my grandmother. I want to, I do, but I never find the time to write her back.

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