I think the world is ending so I put all my nudes in a time capsule and bury it in Tompkins Square Park. I can locate no value in myself beyond the nudes so they are my cosmic bargaining power. My journey starts on the stoop of 101 St Marks Place, where I live with John. John is my boyfriend but he feels more like my father, which is why we're breaking up tomorrow, I've decided, over breakfast.

I walk up 1st Ave, past the hot wings place and two ATMs and a bygone coffee shop, towards the third party post office where I print the photos. I downloaded them to a zip drive which I plug into the printer and then make my body very wide over, like you're advised to when approached by a grizzly bear, so no one can see what I'm doing. I don't mind if people see naked photos of me but I don't want to be standing next to the photos. Photos of me make me feel inadequate.

The first one I print I sent to my highschool boyfriend from his bathroom one Friday after school. He was being oddly quiet and I kept badgering him about what was wrong. Finally, he caved and told me he wanted me to send him a naked picture of myself. I felt bad for making him tell me so I marched into the half-bath like a good little soldier and took a photo of my tits. I then texted it to him and waited for him to respond. He said, "Nice." When we broke up, he showed it to all his friends.

The second photo I took for myself in college because I needed to reclaim the act of photographing my naked body. I begged to borrow my friend Helen's polaroid camera, and she refused because I had dropped her bluetooth speaker onto pavement a few weekends before. I waited until she left for Spring Break and then I ran to her neat, rooibos-smelling room and grabbed the camera. In my mirror, I switched between the editorial and couture poses, caving my back in and then thrusting my chest out with my hands on my hips. I took seven photos and then laid them out in a circle around me on the floor. I didn't like any of them but I chose to keep one and burn the other six.

The third photo Sebastian, my second boyfriend, took of me. We went to Chicago to visit his grandmother and we stayed in a very nice hotel. It was December and freezing so everytime we got back to the room, we'd fill up the giant bath until it was so hot, our skin looked sunburned beneath the water. One night, Sebastian brought back bubble bath and we filled the tub until the bubbles stood a foot taller than the edge. He got his camera and I made sideburns and powdered wigs and bikini tops and bikini bottoms with the foam. My favorite photo is one where I'm blowing a kiss and the bubbles flutter around like tiny crystal bugs. It counts as a nude because if you look very closely, you can see a bit of my left nipple.

The fourth photo I took for John, my third boyfriend, of just my pussy. It was early in our relationship, two years ago, and I was at work making a travel itinerary for some second-rate thriller author when he texted me. He told me he wanted me to go to the bathroom, take off my underwear, and show him. I think this is my favorite photo because I don't feel like I'm in it.

The last photo I took this morning. There is toothpaste on the mirror and I'm standing with my legs apart and my arms above my head like in a TSA metal detector. I balanced the phone on my bathroom shelf, where it fell seconds later, the screen shattering on the small white tiles. I look fatter, older, and sadder than in the other pictures. You can't see the sadness on my face, but in the downward slant of my neck and the clawed-up shapes of my hands. I stared at this photo the longest before I tucked it into my little lockbox time capsule and dug a three-foot deep hole, half that of a dead body, and buried it away. I couldn't believe how much farther down my chest my breasts fall than they used to. But the world is ending, who cares? When the world is ending, it doesn't matter how perky your tits are.

To be honest, I care. When the subway rats bring back the bubonic plague and the Hudson River overflows Battery Park and atomic warheads are dropped on Midtown, all of which is coming, tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. When we're crouched on the roof or in the basement holding one another or hiding from one another, desperate and deprived and regretful of all the tiny, helpful actions we didn't have time to take, I will be there thinking about how perky my tits are. And I will be right.

.

Read her postcard.





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