My name was Eliza. I died the way most teenage girls do: I killed myself, and resumed life under a new name, Ciara. It is also five letters. My full name, Elizabeth Graves, had been passed down by New England Puritans. I never liked my name. I wanted to make it extinct.

My childhood church had a white lancelike steeple that seemed to skewer the sky. Beside the church was a cemetery where I used to play hide and seek among a bunch of graves labeled “Graves.” I thought it was funny but nobody else did. Puritan headstones are crude and refuse aestheticization; no delicate lettering, no angel wings. They didn't want to be remembered. That wasn't the point.

I lost my faith at my first communion. I was thirteen. I did it with three other teens. They lined us up in front of the congregation as though before a firing squad. Our pastor, a sickly-skinny man, believed that he could gaze into a person's eyes and know instantly if that person was one of The Elect. He said there would be a certain light, a ring around the pupil. He gazed into each of my peers faces and blessed them. When he got to mine, I looked up. His eyes were a blue so pale it almost wasn't a color at all. He lingered in mine for a while, then pronounced, “The light of Christ is not in this one.”

My parents never treated me the same after that. Neither did the congregation. Conscientious mothers steered their children away from me. I wasn't allowed to babysit anymore. It was as if my existence no longer held the same value. I wasn't part of the eternal family. I belonged to the realm of earthly things. Nothing I did after that point seemed to matter, and it didn't take long for me to lean into not mattering. I embraced my role as a pariah. I was good at it. Their condemnation only seemed to fuel my mania.

I feared that the pastor's reaction was due to some facial monstrosity, as I didn't know what I looked like and, until I was deemed Unelect, I never thought about it. I had grown up in a house with no mirrors and when I encountered mirrors in public restrooms, I always averted my eyes.

My Calvinist parents knew, instinctively, that there is something cursed about the duplicity of images. My biographers will find no photographs of me as a child, nor any other material record of my early existence. Everything disposable was disposed of in the house I grew up in. This created an environment so ascetic that I was incapable of perceiving myself as something unembodied. In some ways, this innocence was liberating, but, as a young girl, I felt that my full potential was being strategically hindered.

When, in a filmy rest-stop mirror, I finally did meet my own gaze, I saw that, far from being a monstrosity, the opposite was the case. I realized that unlike the others around me, I was born to be remembered—that I am a superstar. And like every superstar, I made a bargain with myself in front of a mirror.

There is a speck in my left eye, a copper freckle, that grants me eternal newness of life. Through it, I am new, again and again. When the pastor looked me in the eye, he recognized its glint, and was afraid. He saw a light that will go out. A light that desperately wants to be captured.

It operates via a parallax trick—similar to what happens when you are riding in a car and you watch the powerlines whip by, even though they aren't moving at all, you are. You start with a self-splitting ritual that can be performed in front of a mirror or a camera, through which one can reproduce asexually. Suddenly, there are two of me: an original self and a projected self. My original self is the one sitting in the car and looking out the window, while my projected self, up in the sky, makes a spectacle out of blinking and shapeshifting. The trick is that to anyone riding in the car—anyone who experiences time at the same rate can be said to be “riding in the car”— my original self appears immutable. But really, it isn’t. All along, my authentic self has been the one mutating and in motion, and my image-self, though it appears to dance between the powerlines, is actually what remains the same over time. The only way to escape this illusion is to jump out of the moving vehicle. Only then would one see that my second self and all the other stars are static.

The parallax explanation is convoluted, I know. I’m sorry. The idea can be simpler. Have you ever watched a dead movie star on screen, James Dean, for instance, and recognized that his image was never alive in and of itself? Have you noticed that, in spite of this, your brain continues to interpret motion as aliveness? That’s the parallax trick. You are the one in motion, not James Dean. Because you are alive and he is dead. Yet, watching him, you feel falsely static and experience a sort of sacrificial “death” in order to bring him back to “life.” It’s not truly life-creation, but it presents itself as such. Because although life-creation is God’s greatest gift, it can be perverted in many ways, one such perversion being the false animation of images. That is how my mother explained the relationship between movies and—her words—“black magic” to me.

My projection is only immutable because it isn’t alive. But, so long as I can divert your attention with my double, I will appear to remain a beautiful young girl. That was the bargain I made with myself in the mirror: that I will continually reinvent myself, shifting further and further away until I can no longer recognize myself, until I am a completely different person. This instinct towards self-destruction is similar to the idea of death drive. Puritans don’t have a death drive, since they don’t believe in death. I believe in death. I believe that I can heighten my aliveness by increasing my mutability. The more dynamic I am, the more movement I create, the more likely I am to be remembered.

So when I say that I killed myself, I don’t mean my body. I’m talking about self-reinvention. I didn’t kill myself so much as I kissed myself. To God, there is nothing on this Earth more beautiful than two girls kissing. Especially when the two girls are the same girl, split by that sliver of glass.

That’s what you texted me once, “Go kiss yourself.” I would rather kiss you. It’s too bad you don’t have a face, which is not a problem for me. I find your facelessness beautiful. That’s what I’ll look like too, once I tabula rasa myself back to preschool again. Pure blank white.

Right now I am sitting in class. My posture is perfect. I am not spewing over my chair like a Balthus girl. My limbs are positioned in tight right angles, creating lines that belong in symbols and marching bands. These lines are not natural and should not be underwiring the form of a late-teenage girl. This is how I sit while anticipating a text from you. My phone is in my lap, in its bubblegum silicon case. My knee is bobbing up and down wildly. I don’t know why my knee does this. I would like it to stop. Maybe it’s my subconscious reminding me that, although I rarely choose it, movement is still an option for me.

My knee is disturbing. Sometimes my classmates stare at it. Though I am a tranquil person, I have pent-up kinetic energy. That is why I am so disturbing. I could fling myself across the room. I haven’t done it yet, and likely won’t, but I can see in the eyes of my peers that they are anticipating my bursting-forth. They’ve been on edge for a year now because they don’t know who I am or what such a burst would entail.

You are only words, ones that I easily could have written. The funny thing about words is that they aren’t real. Language is abstract, so nothing that you say really matters. Few people realize this, but it seems obvious to me. For instance, you may or may not be an ephebophile, and I may or may not be a seventeen-year-old girl. But, really you are just black-and-white pixel combinations on my iPhone 4. None of those combinations could kill me. I could block you and it would be as if you dropped dead. I wouldn’t feel a thing. I made you up, so how could you possibly hurt me?

I can only assume that you have a body, too. But I’ve never seen it. I bet you are ashamed of it. Otherwise, you would’ve sent a picture in response to mine. If you had an attractive body and had sent me a picture, I would’ve ended things then and there. It would’ve botched my fantasy of projecting my image into the pure blank white.

I am triggered by the sheer amount of breath wasted in this classroom. None of my peers know how to shut the fuck up. Not one of them knows how to read either. They just consume information and regurgitate it. They aren’t even using language—just spewing noise. They gobble air like a league of hungry hippos, acting as if the oxygen in the room were running out and they must compete to suffocate each other. In the rare instance where someone does have something vital to say, nobody can hear it over the air-gobblers’ babbling. This is why their breath-waste is not only stupid, but evil.

I’ve spent the whole year in silence, never raising my hand. If I were to speak, I would say: Do you hear that “sound?” Do you hear it encroaching? That is the sound of evil. It has been getting louder for my entire life.

Right now I am staring out the window in physics class, ignoring the teacher and everyone else clogging up my line of vision. The window is slick with lip prints. One of my classmates must have, in a narcissistic frenzy, test-kissed themselves in the darkened glass. No one thought to erase them. The rest of the window is covered in a froth of breath and sweat. I can still see out the window. There are piles of gray snow.

I stare deep into the sludge. I mold you out of it. When I zone out in class, I can make you materialize. There you are, outside the window, cutting into the sky with your slenderman-esque figure. You tell me that it’s a shame what the sun did to my face, that I had been such a stunner once.

Now I will erase three decades of celestial ray damage. Now I’m done. You emerge from the snow with the stunning face of a wunderkind. Though you only look that way to me. To everyone else, you “just have one of those faces.” The kind of face that makes people pause when you pass them by in the hallways. Teachers, childhood friends—people who’ve known you your whole life—pass you by in a state of continual unrecognition. Your face makes everyone a stranger. In fact, people only know you by the intoxicating wave of stupidity they experience when graced with your presence. When you enter the room, your classmates know that they should know something and that they don’t know it. This infuriates them. You are the secret catalyst for all of their rage.

My face is similar, but not identical to yours. We share many of the same features. Though my impression is indelible, it is only my eye gem that gets remembered. It allows you to recognize me without ever really knowing who I am.

I know instinctively that in the deleted draft of next existence, we have already shared the same face. That’s why you are so addicted to looking at pictures of me. You’re searching for your own facial features in mine, for some evidence of that former draft. I know that you want to steal my shape back. You want to suck me like an oyster, to funnel all the youth out from under my cheeks.

I am writing the next draft. You and I are the same age. We perforate the slush as we walk towards the buses. You’re wearing a black, wool jacket that reaches your knees. Your shadow is priestly. I’m wearing a baby blue, zip-up hoodie that’s so thin, it showcases my ribs.

Your hair is dark, like mine. You wear it longish to veil the plummy bruise around your right eye. It was only after you got the bruise that your face came into focus. Before that, you just had “one of those faces.” You used to pass me by in the hallway, indistinguishable from the oncoming blur of faces. Now that I have singled you out, you not only have a name, but an entire backstory. We grew up together, attending the same church. We sat across from each other during Sunday school. I would glance down at the weekly devotional hand-out without opening it, as if it were a menu and, I, a devote anorexic. I would look up at you and notice a vacancy in your eyes that was reflected in mine. Neither of us were ever truly there. This is when our desire for each other was at its strongest. After it diminished, we spent decades trying to re-enact it, without success.

Much of the scripture was read out loud, and although it all washed over me, I absorbed many verses and themes subliminally. Sunday school was where I concocted my most vivid fantasies. Reading the passages put me into a meditative state somewhere between sleeping and waking. I would think about what you must be thinking about—which, I speculated, was the same thing I was thinking about. It was an odd foreshadowing. In later years, we would sit across from each other in a variety of settings, many of which involved dejected menus, and continually confirm that we had, in fact, been thinking of the same thing, obsessively, the entire time. But with each confirmation, this seemed less and less plausible, and more like a mutual delusion.

If I space out well enough, I can remember where I should rightfully be, in that other draft where you and I were born in the same place, at the same time. It could still happen. Even if we are born next as twins, it will only be a coincidence. Whoever you are, you should be here, sitting at the desk next to me. You say you are here, but you’re lying. I can feel your absence deep inside me. I sit and wait, the weight of which rots my face. You press your palm against your forehead, as if to dampen an ache.

“We grew up going to church together. It was a white church with a lancelike steeple. We used to play among a cluster of graves labeled ‘Graves.’ They were the graves of my ancestors. I come from a long line of embittered New England Puritans. Same as you.”

“You don’t have a coat.” You observe.

“You might not remember. You’re severely concussed.”

I look down at the snow.

“What happened to your eye?”

You pause and turn towards the darkened windows of the gym building. You push your hair aside to examine your eye.

“My face is fucked.” You say.

“You look like Victor Brauner. I used to like the surrealists. A hundred years ago, surrealism was disturbing. Not anymore. Except Victor Brauner. His self-portrait still disturbs me. He painted himself with only one eye, with the empty socket drooping down like this—”

I tug on the skin beneath my eye, revealing red and veins.

“When he painted it he still had two eyes. After he finished the painting, he got a drink. A fight broke out. A glass shattered and a shard flew into Brauner’s right eye, disfiguring it so that he resembled his portrait exactly. It was like he hyperstitioned an accident. The painting itself isn’t as good as the story—but I do think it says something about time.”

“You think I’m going to lose my eye?”

“No. I think you already lost it.”

You look at me, disgusted. I wanted to tell you that time isn’t linear. That’s how I happen to know you.

We reach the edge of the schoolyard where dozens of buses are lined up. You peer into a bus and notice that it’s empty. They’re all empty. You realize that there is no way to get home. Then you realize you have no memory attached to the word “home.” I watch these epiphanies play out on your face. It’s flurrying. We stand in silence, letting the soft flakes hit our cheeks. I watch your Adam’s apple rise and fall, more and more vigorously.

“Don’t be afraid,” I say, “Look.” I point down at the snow.

“Look at what?”

You’re quivering.

“Whiteness. Blankness.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Look closer.”

You get on your knees.

“Press your face into the snow.”

You press your face into the snow.

“All you see is white. Then, all you see is black.”

You re-emerge with clumps of frost glistening on your chin.

“Not everyone gets to start over. You’re a gifted person. Do you remember all the games we used to play together in the church basement while our parents fraternized? It didn’t matter what game we played—scrabble, chess, etc. You always beat me. Until you grew sensitive of my insecurities and started to lose, tactfully, on purpose. I wasn’t smart enough to beat you, but I wasn’t dumb enough to believe I could win against you. You are just one of those people who are ‘born better.’ In addition to intelligence, you’ve been granted eternal newness of life. Unlike me, you are one of The Elect.”

I smile, thinking about how special you are. There's no envy shining through my tooth gap.

You look like you want to bash my head against the brick wall, which is what you do.

As I fall, I shoot you a woozy smile. I’m concussed. The snow beneath me turns to Strawberry Icee. I want to kiss you, but you don’t have a face.

For ten seconds, movement is still an option for me. I choose to lift up my hoodie and reveal the fractals of Lichtenberg figures racing up my stomach.

From your lip formations, I know that you’re shouting. What I don’t know is whether you are exclaiming in awe of my fractal scars or in sudden realization that you just killed the only woman you ever liked. She was that girl you grew up with. You think, Eliza. Then you think, Yes, Eliza. We knew each other as babies. Then we had sex.

It is 11:30am. I am still a well-postured schoolgirl, sitting in class. I am sitting in Balthus girl positions, with my spine curved, as if in preparation for sex. I don’t know what sex is. My knee is bobbing wildly, of its own accord. I sit, with my phone balanced on my lap, secure in its bubblegum silicon case. I call this position “poised in the interim.” This is how I sit while anticipating a text from you. I love to wait.