As you remember, you were badly dressed but skinny, with gravity-defying tits and an ass the boys sometimes slapped at school, even if you were wearing something patently unsexy like those striped train-conductor overalls you loved. You were frizzy-haired and plain-faced and privileged and sweet and moody. You were tediously Pollyannaish about anything to do with social justice and performatively contrarian about everything else. You kept a shrine to John Lennon in your bedroom at the center of which was this satisfyingly heavy biography you’d never read but in front of which you lit flying-fairy Chinatown incense. You liked to say you were “born at the wrong time.” You preferred animals and children to anyone else. You had no idea what to do with your body but you were always already a hedonistic little ball of senses and you understood pleasure. You loved music and food and the smell of the boy’s armpits and being touched. You had enormous eyes and enormous ears and you were just cripplingly earnest, but, having been raised by fast-talking New Yorkers and having consumed too much art, sometimes disarmingly adult banter came dropping from your mouth and the contrast must have been alarming. You were happiest alone in the woods or with a book. You cried over things like the fact that flowers didn’t bloom for that long. That they had to die. Seriously, literally, you cried about this. You had just turned seventeen and the facts of the world were pressing in on you for the first time with a sort of tedious, metaphysical, white-girl sadness that felt too much to bear. And he was the first one who said to you, Hey, people have like, written poems about that stuff, you know? And songs. Do you know Keats? David Byrne? He showed you how to find yourself in this way. Introduced you to the sacred texts of the terminally sensitive.