There are things I do out of ritual, the small repetitive acts that convince me my life has a shape even when it mostly feels like a series of loosely connected delays, like brushing my teeth, cursing my ex in exactly the same order every time, buying overpriced chocolate even when it is very clearly, aggressively not on sale, and then there’s the station kiosk, which I pretend is incidental but absolutely is not, the lone little shrine to impulse and poor self-control that I used to visit every month, sometimes every Thursday if I was feeling particularly brave or particularly bored, to check the latest issue of Big Boobs Monthly, and I want to be very clear here, I had two reasons for this, two, not one, because that sounds sadder than it needs to be: one, the articles, which were—shockingly—not about astrophysics or urban planning or anything that would improve me as a person, and two, to check if I had finally hit rock bottom, because if you’re going to spiral, you might as well take notes, and every time I stood there pretending to casually browse, hands hovering in the air like I was flicking through glossy pages without actually committing to touching anything, I told myself I was half-ironic and half-curious and fully in control, which in hindsight is exactly what someone says right before they absolutely are not, because every cover was the same, every single one, some pneumatic goddess draped in suggestion and baby oil, pouting like she’d just been told her latte had almond milk instead of oat, always with a title screaming something subtle and nuanced like “Double Trouble: Twins Who Wrestle!” or “Teachers Gone Wild—Extra Credit Edition!”, you know, feminism, and I’d stand there pretending to flip through it, like I was conducting anthropological fieldwork on horniness, like this was research, like I might one day publish a paper called Observations from the Newsstand: A Study, and I’d scoff, roll my eyes, maybe even chuckle at the captions, because nothing says emotional distance like a sarcastic exhale, but I always looked, always, and part of me—and I hate how honest this sounds, but here we are—part of me hoped I’d see someone who looked like me, not because I wanted to be in it, that’s ridiculous, truly hilarious, but because I wanted to believe that I could be, that there was some alternate version of Tallulah who didn’t have to apologize to mirrors, and I know, I know, it’s stupid, it’s deeply stupid, but I let myself have it anyway, and on that special Thursday I did exactly what I always did, I approached the stand ready to fake intellectual superiority, ready to roll my eyes at the glossy absurdity, ready to perform my little superiority dance, and then I saw it, and that’s when everything stopped.

At first I thought it was someone who just looked like me, which is a very specific kind of mental loophole your brain opens when reality is about to do something unforgivable, that moment where you see a familiar face on an unfamiliar body and your mind politely suggests coincidence, like, hey, weird, she’s got my nose, isn’t that funny, noses are so common, and I remember blinking, once, slowly, as if that might reset the image, but then it wasn’t just the nose, it was my nose, and my mouth, and my breasts, and suddenly the loophole slammed shut because there they were, unmistakably mine, laid out with editorial confidence, and I was standing there at the kiosk with my hand halfway through turning a page when I saw it, dead center, glossy, high resolution, cover girl, topless, under the words “UNWRAPPED: The Girl Who Didn’t Say No,” and something in me simply… stopped. No panic. No scream. No cinematic reaction whatsoever. Just static. Like the part of my brain responsible for reacting had quietly gone to lunch and left a polite note saying back in twenty. My hand stayed mid-page-turn, my body didn’t move an inch, but inside it was like all the furniture in a house had rearranged itself while I stood in the hallway holding a cup of tea, everything familiar suddenly wrong but technically still upright, and I almost laughed at how surreal it felt, because surreal is what people say when they mean I cannot process this without emotionally shutting down, and that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t faint. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even put the magazine down. I just stood there staring at my own nipples in glossy print next to a barcode and a subscription offer, feeling oddly clinical about it, like I was observing evidence rather than my own body, and the strangest part was that the only clear thought that managed to form in all that silence was this small, sharp, deeply unhelpful observation: that lighting does absolutely nothing for my collarbones.

It was a joke, obviously, that’s how it always starts, everything starts as a joke because jokes are how you sneak past your own better judgment without it noticing, and of course it was a joke, Frank even said so, hey, don’t be so serious, and I remember thinking that was rich coming from him, because I said I’m not serious, you’re serious, and he laughed in that way people do when they think they’ve already won, and then he said, come on, let me take just one, and I said, one what, because I genuinely didn’t know where this was going yet, and he said, one of those, and he gestured, vaguely, carelessly, at my chest, like it was a category rather than a part of me, and I laughed, because that was easier than stopping everything, I rolled my eyes and said something like, what is this, a casting call for disappointment, and he said, it’s for art, which, if you’ve been paying attention at all, is the mating call of the emotionally irresponsible, the phrase people use when they want absolution in advance, and I remember there being a pause there, a tiny one, not dramatic, just enough time for me to notice that I could still say no, and then I didn’t, and I let him take it, the photo, one, just one, that was the agreement, and I was holding a mug, I remember that clearly, because it made everything feel casual, like this was happening incidentally rather than deliberately, I wasn’t posing, I wasn’t pouting, I wasn’t even fully awake in my own body yet, it was one of those slow, dim afternoons, and he looked at the camera and then at me and said, that’s it, that’s the one, and I said, you better delete it, because even then there was a flicker of something, some instinct trying to clear its throat, and he said, of course, and I said, like, now, and he said, sure, sure, in that way that sounds cooperative but means nothing at all, and I let it go, because at the time we were naked and everything felt soft, the light was low, it was Sunday afternoon, that liminal hour where the world feels temporarily suspended, and you want to believe people more when you’re not wearing pants, there’s something about vulnerability that convinces you it’s mutual even when it isn’t, and after that I didn’t think about it again, or at least I told myself I didn’t, because not thinking about it was easier than deciding what it meant, and Frank had this way of flattening moments, of smoothing them out until you forgot they had any depth at all, until they felt like nothing had really happened, and then months later—months, enough time for it to feel safely buried—there it was, the image, same angle, same lighting, same mug, like a perfect little echo of that afternoon, except now it was on forty-two thousand newsstands, wedged between a recipe for aphrodisiac cupcakes and an interview with someone who once dated a guy who looked like Zac Efron, which I think was the part that finally made me laugh, because of course that’s where it would end up, and the framing was the same, technically, meticulously, but the intimacy was not, and that difference—that gap—was where everything fell apart.

I didn’t buy the magazine, which feels important somehow, like a decision I should be able to frame as principled or dramatic, but really I just stood there flipping through its pages the way you do when you’re killing time and pretending you’re looking for something specific, like a sudoku or an article titled How Did This Happen to You Personally, and the paper felt too glossy, too clean, like it had never known a human thought, and some guy brushed past me and said sorry and I said it’s fine because it was and also it wasn’t, because that’s the thing about those moments, they don’t announce themselves as injuries, they just register as paperwork, and I put the magazine back on the shelf carefully, absurdly carefully, like it might explode if I startled it, like it contained a small, ticking device labeled Consequences, and then I walked home, unlocked the door, made toast—burned one side, scraped it, ate it anyway—and watched three solid hours of a reality show about competitive dog grooming, poodles with better emotional arcs than me, and at no point during any of this did I feel anything that resembled an emotion, not sadness, not anger, not even the cheap kind of outrage you can monetize later, just this flat, administrative disbelief, like I’d been cc’d on an email about my own life and forgotten why I was included, and that part came later, much later, in the shower, at 2:13 a.m., when the house was quiet enough to hear the pipes think, and I tried to shampoo my hair and couldn’t remember which hand was holding the bottle, which felt less like confusion and more like my brain briefly stepping out for a cigarette, and I didn’t cry, I didn’t scream, I didn’t throw my phone against the wall or call Frank and threaten to Photoshop his penis onto a tuna can and leak it to his mother—though I want it noted for the record that the thought did cross my mind in a purely logistical way—and instead I just stood there and let the water run and thought, wow, so that’s what I look like when I’ve been commodified, when I’ve been reduced to a concept someone else can shelve alphabetically, and I always thought there’d be more glitter, more spectacle, more obvious villainy, and instead it was just me and tile and lukewarm water and the vague sense that a form had been filed somewhere without my signature, and I sat down in the tub, still naked, still dripping, still very much a person despite evidence to the contrary, and started laughing—not the healthy kind, not the movie-epiphany kind with swelling music and a lesson, but the kind that feels like something inside you is cracking politely, like a teacup splitting along a hairline fracture you only notice when it’s too late, and then it passed, because laughter always does, it clocks out, leaves you with the mess, and somehow expects you to tidy up after it.