On the eve of my 20th birthday, I wrote in my journal: It’s midnight. Holy fuck. I’m 20. I’ve just crossed over and the party’s already started.
The party consisted of drinking straight vodka with a group of five college friends I just met and quickly grew attached to only a month prior. They were canonically the college friends you make in art school: throwing invite-only top floor apartment parties, drinking straight liquor (because why would I want jungle juice?), staying up too late in the city, getting really into cigarettes, falling in love and the drama that blows up into.
We threw a 2013 Tumblr themed party in a two-bedroom apartment, and I loved every second of it. It was the perfect send-off from teenagerhood to I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing-in-my-twenties. We danced, laughed, kissed, and discarded cigarette butts onto the street. I was glowing, shimmering. Is this what it’s supposed to feel like all the time?
The next morning (after breakfast tacos soaked up the liquor in our empty stomachs) I sifted through Polaroids I had taken, sparking memories from the night that passed. I never want this to end, I wrote in my journal. 20 is going to be memorable. But only in flashes. And probably the day after.
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In my senior year of high school my theatre director introduced me to The Velvet Underground. I listened to “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “Venus in Furs” in calculus class. The signature John Cale droning echoed in my ears until the bell rang. I imagined existing in the sixties, making art surrounded by the Silver Factory’s tin foil walls, and partying with Warhol’s superstars.
More importantly, I wanted to be Edie Sedgwick. Her iconography became religious to me: pixie-cut, silver hair, heavy eyeliner, black tights, and leopard jacket. A month before my 18th birthday I got a pixie-cut and posed for a picture with my mouth agape, looking away like something more intriguing was happening off camera.
Unlike the photographs, Edie’s life was far from glamorous. After a tragic adolescence, her aspirations of acting in Andy’s films were plagued by drugs and ephemeral love. So, the muse was tossed out, easily as a cigarette.
But not me, I thought. Not me.
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The day after I turned 20, I wrote in red pen the lyrics, “Here she comes again with vodka in her veins,” from Primal Scream’s 1986 song “Velocity Girl.” The 7” depicts a photograph of Ciao Manhattan-era Edie sitting with a fierce, far-off look. One I tried to replicate for years: the Girl on Fire, Girl of the Year, Andy’s Superstar.
I lived at that velocity through my sophomore and junior year of college. But I was failing as an actress. My leftover scholarship money funded our epicurean habits. Our two-year long “four-day benders” are all immortalized on sticky Polaroid film I still keep tucked away in a photo album on my shelf.
It ended just as fast as when the flashbulb hit the whites of my eyes. I was tossed out.
I won’t chronicle my blindsided breakup, but just like the final lyrics of “Velocity Girl” “my so-called friends have left me / And now I don’t care at all / Leave me alone / Leave me alone / Leave me alone.”
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After my 22nd birthday I became self-destructive. The man I fell in love with didn’t love me back (or so I thought). I rarely bought my own drinks and I never bought my own drugs. I wore “a hand-me-down dress from who knows where to all tomorrow’s parties.” I went out almost every night with a new group of older friends to small dives, karaoke bars, goth clubs, and top-floor apartments—getting home just in time to wait tables a little hungover. I learned what cocktails to order (I hated vodka now). I learned what drugs felt good and which ones felt really really bad. I learned how life got away from me in a constant cycle of self-loathing and truly unglamorous debauchery.
On Christmas I was in a crowded bar, only lit by red fluorescents, waiting to close out my tab when I caught a glimpse of my reflection behind the liquor bottles. Who am I? Where was the muse? Is she still me? I desperately fixed my bangs to find a semblance of myself again. “Your hair looks awesome by the way,” a drunken stranger next to me said. “Oh! Thank you,” I replied, shocked that someone saw me. I signed the check and got the fuck out of there.
I think at this point—like Edie—I just wanted to be loved. To come home and be taken care of. Have someone slip off my shoes, roll down my stockings, unzip my dress, and hand me a glass of water.
New Year’s Eve punched me in the face. I was so upset I hadn’t done a bump of coke and kissed the love of my life as the ball dropped. So upset that a new year turned, and I was still doomed. When the clock struck midnight, I blacked out on the concrete. The next morning, in a bathroom that wasn’t my own, I noticed I busted my lip and cut the side of my face. It took me three months to realize that something worse than surface lacerations happened to me that night.
I want this to end.
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Now, almost 23, I sit in a dimly lit restaurant my boyfriend picked out for us, sipping luxuriously on a Manhattan (more excited for the black cherry at the end) and savoring our tipsy conversation. Or we’re at our favorite dive bar throwing back whiskey gingers and getting really excited about the music that’s playing. Or we’re in a pub drinking pints of Guinness and chasing the high of a great date we had there once. Or we’re curled up in bed celebrating another day together with champagne.
I’m no longer that girl holed up in the Silver Factory. I extinguished the Girl on Fire.