It’ll be a relief, my mother said once, the end of all that being looked at. She said she wanted it to be just her, no men to show off for and though at the time I didn’t believe she meant it, now I suppose I do. Maybe it was the way Henry looked at me, stripped, the way I’d asked him to look, but today there’s a sort of contentment to invisibility, even if I suspect it won’t last. I suspect I’ll recover, return, and sometimes the wanting will, too: to be beautiful, to be seen, to be loved and never left. Desire like that isn’t a failure, or a girlhood flight of fancy. It’s a fact of every
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