I scour Pinterest for pictures of all the people I want to be after I do not exist. The stubble-jawed boy in a perfect dark-academia pullover, and who got into every dream college I never applied to. The man with a wolf cut, who poses aesthetically against the rail of Pont Alexandre III.

“Talk to me Olivia,” Sadie begs. I shut my phone off with a click.

The night is unusually warm for fall. It reminds me of the summers we would play together as kids. Roughhousing in the side streets, to come home so bruised our parents thought we had been jumped. We would challenge each other to hold sour candies in our mouths, till we both spat at once.

“I am talking.” I used to kiss her in high school but never the way I wanted. Like a guy would, I  would explain. She would pull down my shirt and sigh, is it so hard for you to accept you’re gay

“About what is bothering you, I mean. Why you have not you been returning my calls… Come on, what has you going ghost suddenly?” Sadie says this as she leads me through her garden, where she eats straight from the earth. Carrots, sugar peas and squash still sheened with dirt. She tells me to join in, but I refuse, despite how my stomach growls. This is the Garden of Hades. If I accept, her kindness will trap me here forever, in her debt, in her warmth. After I was kicked out of my house, she offered to buy me dinner. I ended up squatting on her couch for weeks. She is good at making people stay.

I tell her about my ex-partner, rent troubles, job hunting. All the while, I run my plan repeatedly through my head, till it is sharp as a rib fracture. This is how I plan to remove myself: I will stand outside my parent’s house–the smell of rotten leaves fresh on my skin–a penniless, community college dropout. It will be my birthday and there will be a baby in my arms, swaddled in hospital cloth. “He’s a boy,” I will tell the mother and Father inside. “He’s yours.”