Montreal, QC

I used to be something of a goth, or maybe a metalhead. At any rate, I wore a lot of black – a lot of band t-shirts. I used to have this wallet chain. At the time, I half-knew it was ridiculous, but I thought it imbued my look with an air of coolness, perhaps even danger – an aspiration negated wholly by the fact that I was a doughy-faced bourgeois white girl, but which I nevertheless pursued with the demented zeal of someone who is really sick of being called cute: Don’t you see how black my shirt is? Don’t you hear the rumbling of post-punk blasting through my headphones? I nursed this pleasant illusion until the end of my second year of undergrad, when my wallet chain got caught in a bench, and broke as I attempted to get it free. At this point, my companions clapped with delight, exclaiming that I had liberated myself from the shackles of bad adolescent taste. The wallet has since been lost, but I’ve kept the cross necklace I wore with it.