I don’t know whose grave we decided to sit on when we opened our champagne, but I remember a stretch of lawn and a leafy canopy of trees. Goethe said that the mind is always grateful to encounter green, that once we have it in our eyes, we have neither the desire nor the power to consider a state beyond it. Lying in the grass under the hieroglyphic branches of our green room in Père Lachaise, we swigged from the bottle and smoked cigarettes full of hash, we forgot about the cemetery and about time and about the future. Drunk and high and seduced by the casual glamour of being young, we closed our eyes and went to sleep. 

I was 20 years old in the spring of 1998, living in Paris with a guy named Jamie who I hardly knew and doing my best to find the fun I’d never had in the small town I grew up in. Jamie and I were both accidental fashion models, and we were introduced at a party by someone who thought we would like each other because we looked so much alike. I guess in some way this must have been true; we were together for more than a year, though I recall thinking even then that we really had almost nothing else in common. 

It’s a strange thing to have a relationship with someone who so resembles you; there is something compellingly asexual and safe about it, the aesthetic familiarity smoothing out all of the rough edges that usually abrade us in the course of young love. I can imagine what the two of us must have looked like together, and I remember the pleasure people expressed when they encountered us, a set of pale and long limbed doppelgangers echoing off of one another in infinite regression. Though I can access flashes of who the two of us were and what we  must have indicated to others, I can’t hold any part of the experience in my mind for longer than a few seconds, maybe a minute. Time has compressed all of it down to a handful of residual impressions, a stack of snapshots that wander around inside of me familiar and foreign, at the same time intimately near and very far away.

It was May when a friend of Jamie’s named Nate Maddox came to stay with us. He was in Paris for the return leg of a trip that I believe was described to me as some kind of spiritual journey to the East, but don’t quote me. Maybe I only think that because he had a copy of Siddhartha and seemed to have almost no personal belongings. I know that he was from California and wore a strangely lusterless slice of onyx on one of his fingers. I know that one night he came back to our apartment with a black eye and ripped pants and a story about getting jumped by some teenagers in Pigalle. They stole his wallet and his lucky dice, he told us, but they’d somehow missed the ring. That night, I asked him if he would write a letter to my friend Leah back home in Rhode Island. I wanted him to tell her what the pyramids really look like and to describe what it feels like to get mugged, but he wrote to her about Jonathan Livingston Seagull instead. She was charmed by the sentiment, but he was gone before she had a chance to write back. For years I thought that maybe they could have fallen in love. 

One afternoon, Jamie and Nate and I bought a bottle of champagne and took the train to Père Lachaise. It was verdant and flowering and warm, and the cherry blossoms fell while we consulted a plot map like tourists looking for stars. Walking through the cemetery’s neighborhoods, we paused sometimes to peer through arched panels of stained glass, to test locks and look for bones. Nate said it was bad luck when I opened the letters at Oscar Wilde’s lipstick-stained grave and read them out loud. I said that I was glad Jim Morrison was dead and told Jamie I would die of shame if he didn’t stop playing Riders on the Storm on his harmonica, but I’m sure that I laughed when he did it anyway. Outside of these recollections, my primary impressions are of an afternoon that was wandering and aimless, a blur of cobblestone paths and peaked mausoleums, of weeping women who were conjured from stone a hundred years before we were ever born, and then our drinks and cigarettes and the stumble into slumber. 

The sun had sunk beneath the skyline when we finally woke up. Père Lachaise’s little streets were empty, its shrouded criers and veil-draped urns glowing blue from dusk. I don’t remember when we realized that we’d been locked in, but I know that we called out for help, that we pounded on a caretaker’s door and rapped on windows and rang bells that were never answered. Convinced that we couldn’t scale the height of the gate, we walked the square perimeter of the cemetery and were met on all sides by a surprisingly steep drop, as though an architect had constructed four walls of negative space to remind ghosts not to travel. I have no idea how long we were trapped, but I know that it was dark out when we somehow made it over the fence and into the street, laughing and alive and thrilled by our brief entrapment in a heterotopia constructed to contain the dead. I’d broken the heel on one of my shoes, and I remember limping my way to a casting on the other side of town, the two boys in tow. I don’t remember if I got the job or not.

We didn’t take any photographs that day, mostly because I was superstitious at the time, and felt that you shouldn’t document a place unless you never planned to return to it. When I want to, I can reconstruct afternoons like the one described above by leafing through the images in an old portfolio that I keep wedged on the bottom shelf of a bookcase. This portfolio contains a two-page spread in i-D by Craig McDean in which I’m wearing a blunt cut black wig and long leather gloves, staring across the chasm of the magazine’s spine at a girl who I thought was just like me with the added benefit of being slightly better than me in every single way. There is a picture from a Diesel campaign that was taken in a nuclear fallout shelter in Poland that shows me glowering at a white-blonde Finnish woman named Tanja. There is a set of tear sheets that show me blindfolded and wandering through London traffic. Five pages of editorial in Jalouse where I am lounging naked on a bed of Fendi furs at The Ritz. A cover shot by Steven Klein in which I am  wearing 60s Saint Lauren with my face painted red, a black paper mitre listing atop my head at an airstrip in New Jersey. I don’t look at them very often because they don’t feel like they are of anyone I know.

I have tried many times  to recount my modeling years, the strangely rote story of how I was discovered while working in a hair salon, what it meant to suddenly feel desire for a thing I never even knew I wanted, the hope and dread and humiliation I felt over whether or not I was beautiful or interesting or compelling enough to claim space on a magazine cover or a runway. Once in a while, I still have nightmares that I’ve run out of options and I’m back in a little model’s apartment again, only this time much older and much more ashamed, knowing as I do that there will always be something satisfying about the idea of being reduced to the realm of the spectral. 

 A few months after the afternoon with Jamie and Nate, Juergen Teller took my picture in the doorway of his London studio. I don’t need to consult it to tell you exactly how it looks; you might know it yourself as part of the artist’s seminal Go Sees project, which was  published in a book by the same title in 1999. In this image, I am wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and a pair of jeans that are held up by a white studded belt that I’d made myself. I’m holding my hand to my mouth and staring into the lens with a look that reminds me of how it felt to be young and lost and hungry for some ineffable thing that I still can’t quite explain. It’s a photograph that feels like the truth, whatever that means, and it’s one that feels like the version of me that was locked in the cemetery with those boys all those years ago. Maybe it’s the picture we didn’t take together when we were actually there.

One night several months after Jamie and I had broken up, I saw him in a bar in the Marais. He climbed up on my table and started taking his clothes off, drunk and loud but still kind of funny. When I stood up to leave, he asked me why I didn’t love him anymore; I didn’t look back because I didn’t have an answer. We didn’t speak again until 2016, when someone on Instagram tagged an old photograph of the two of us together. In this picture—also by Teller— we are strangely interchangeable with our matching shirts and black bobs, my hand reaching out for a blade of grass while we make out in a field of Technicolor green. I was happy to hear from him when he messaged me and told him that I’d thought of him in 2002 when I heard that Nate died. He was struck by lightning on a rooftop in New York while watching a bank of storm clouds rolling in. “One day I’ll die in an interesting way and you better write about it,” Jamie said. I didn’t remember the request until last summer when I learned that he was gone too, that he’d fallen asleep with a concussion and never woke up. I thought about the three of us that day in the cemetery, about how very short the bridge is from then to now.