Three blocks from her house, Sadie calls you The Confuser again (she’s not even drunk this time) then follows up with the old refrain: you’d make the perfect boyfriend if only you were a boy. You don’t tell her that if you could choose, your body would be as mutable as the smoke trailing off her cigarette.

You think of the David Bowie poster on your bedroom wall, in particular the silvery liquid – space cum, Sadie once joked – filling the bowl of Bowie’s right clavicle. One drop threatens to spill but hangs in suspended animation, teasing with potential. If you were made of that stuff, you’d take any shape Sadie could love.

You’re all flesh, though, so you apologize. Sadie laughs either because she thinks you’re kidding or wants you to be, but you’re in her driveway before you can explain, and in a flash of wavering gap-toothed smile, she’s left you alone in too much quiet.

You crank Ziggy Stardust and speed into country dark.

David Bowie doesn’t give a damn what you are – boy, girl, both or neither, alien androgyne with starlight between your legs. His favorite lyric is You (by your count, there are 112 iterations of the second person on this album) and each time he sings it you wonder, Did you mean me? Me, who you kiss and name Beautiful, Not Alone, Wonderful? My hands you’re reaching for?

At the traffic light, you scan the sky for something between the stars: a spaceship, a messiah on board to deliver you home. You pray one night you might dissolve into glitter and ascend.