tiffany: (i)

When you were young, you tended to fantasize. You’d often imagine scenes of roses and petals and stems, and each one would feature a girl. She’d be beautiful, in that conventional kind of way, and while you could envision her long dark hair and lithe frame, her face would remain a question mark – utterly blank. You supposed you wouldn’t know what the girl of your dreams looked like until you stumbled upon her one day. Even as you got older, that face remained blank and featureless – that was, until you met Tiffany anyway.

She liked books. Ones that weren’t too thick or too thin – ones that were long but not too long. She liked biographies, feminist ones. She always wanted to lend them to you. But you never read them because you preferred the fictional over the factual.

You met her in Los Angeles, through mutual friends. She seemed new to the city, but the way she leaned back in her bar stool was done with a familiarity you couldn’t explain. She looked so at ease in that crowded space, you thought, as though it were her home. She could’ve pulled out a pillow, climbed up on the bar and took a nap and it wouldn’t have seemed strange at all.

She shook your hand when you introduced yourself and smiled at you like you were some kind of gift that had been given to her. You felt it in your chest, all the way down to your fingertips.

* * *

Tiffany. Tiffany Young. Tiffany Hwang. Stephanie. Miyoung.

You wondered how all these names could belong to the same person, you wondered how she got them all in the first place. You thought maybe they were like trophies she’d collected from all her past lives. You thought maybe each one was an upgrade from the next. You wondered which one she wanted to be called.

There was something so curious about her. You couldn’t quite put your finger on it. She smiled a lot, you’d noticed, and greeted strangers with hugs. She talked a lot but never said much about herself. You wondered how it was that people got close to her and you wondered what you’d have to do to be one of those people.

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