Immediately subsequent to my 31st birthday, everything went to shit. I remember the exact sensation of the shrimp choking the life out of me; the almost tender way my throat began to massage itself closed, little wiry threads of pain radiating out like a sun coronet.

Just a few hours before, I’d been in Versailles, in a pannier and a corset that gave me unimpeachable posture for the first time in my life. I’d shook the confetti of a night well-spent out of my big hair, piled high with costume pearls and real, cut roses. I smelled like sweat, and the kind of sweet drunkenness that comes from filling up on champagne. Kristine was asleep when I got out of the shower, collapsed onto the bed in the next room, face down. Her hair dye leaving red kisses on everything.

A few hours later; barely enough rest; we were balancing boxes too heavy for us with our ornate costume regalia inside, wondering how women had worn garments heavy as statues like these, day after day, and wishing fervently that they still did. We were drinking vanilla frappés and reveling in the kind of friendship where you don’t need talk to be in togetherness. It was 9AM, and we were on the train bound for Paris, our faces scrubbed, our limits flirted with, and our phones full of memories. The party at Versailles had been a good one, a hearty, haute-frat welcome into middle-age.

“You look flush,” my mother said, when we’d gotten back home. The apartment in Paris was wide and bright and straddled a rooftop commandeered by flowers and a small picnic table for eating. She’d laid out a welcome-home carboard takeaway carton of shrimp pad thai for us to share. We were imbibing on red wine, on the veranda, slapping at bugs and taking in the late June warmth, reveling in the freedom of our now-unburdened arms. The pleasant soreness from carrying them both in box and body was still on our arms, and the vanilla from earlier was perfuming the wine. It felt momentarily idyllic.

“I’m not flush.” I’d contended. My mother was always saying such things about my face: it looks red, it looks swollen, you seem pale, you feel feverish. Any time I was taken in and fact-checked with a mirror, it was just my face. My normal, regular face. Her favorite sharp barb of criticism was to tell me I had chocolate on the side of my mouth, where two fat, squat freckles sit, deep cocoa-brown. She always seemed to forget about the freckles, despite their constancy on my face.

No, really. She’d say, simpering with gusto any time I’d refuse to consult my reflection, Look!

I’d long ago stopped checking the mirror when she insisted, and shorter ago, stopped caring that if I did I’d be met with the same image as always: two doe eyes, large mouth, and a virgule of a scar shooting down my face onto my lip, making the top line mushy. Cupid’s bow on you, Cupid’s arrow on me. 

I ignored her.

I took another sip of the wine, and let the banter carry me. We regaled with stories of the evening, the secret doors and the bruises our dancing left and the heat of our masked disguises and how it felt to clutch a hot coffee by the surf of a fountain at sunrise, served from a silver platter in a paper cup. All the little slices of fancy that still clung to us, juicy.

A few moments later, Kristine and my father; also seated at the long wooden picnic table soft with rain and rot; both agreed that I did look red. Unable to ignore an opinion when it became a Greek chorus, I grumbled that I never got sun burnt, or wine flush. It wasn’t possible for me to be flush, my skin was too toasty for that, a mixology of ethnic backgrounds that meant airport security didn’t profile me, even though I slathered my food in achiote and repelled sunshine. I took out my phone and pointed the front-facing camera at myself.

My face, which greeted me in reverse, was red and splotchy. I had a hail storm of blushing pigments against my cheeks and nose, different target zones of pink to magenta. I was flush. Mom was right.

Unnerved, I waved it off and tried to return to the banter. My father was saying something about the Broadway musical, The Producers. “Springtime for Hitler,” or Matthew Broderick’s professionalism on live stage, or Nathan Lane’s weight gains…

Somewhere within that monologue, I stopped listening. Or, more accurately, had lost the ability to listen and process. That realization struck me like a slap, and I staggered up to my feel. It reminded me, in a panic, of the only time I’d tried an edible. Blue, glittery, and tasting of unidentifiable tropical fruits, I’d laid out on the couch of a friend in Massachusetts, and for three whole hours, I couldn’t remember anything beyond the span of a few seconds. Benjamin Button. I just kept restarting, going in reverse. When the high had passed, I recalled only one thing: looking at a photo of my friend’s co-worker and whispering, “she’s a galaxy.” I was sick immediately after.

Something was wrong. Standing up, I announced it. Suddenly that red across my face felt aggressive. A toad giving a warning of poison within. 

I walked quickly back indoors, past the living room with the futon, and into the kitchen, where I sat myself on the terra-cotta tiles and put my burning face in my hands and wept, wheezed, rocked, sweat, and shook, on repeat, in cycles. They gave me a steroid pill I’d had in my purse, from the time this first happened, in March. Two hours later, I wasn’t dead yet. My eyes regained themselves, back from their swim. 

Earlier, I’d picked all the shrimp out of my portion of pad thai, because I don’t like shrimp. I’d given them over to Kristine with the clean precision only chopsticks are capable of. Shrimp don’t like me either, it turned out. Even without consuming one, my newly-formed allergy crystallized in my gut as an exclamation point at the end of Happy Birthday! Like Maleficent cursing a grown child for sending her party e-invite to the wrong address. Forgive me! It was a typo.

At the time, on the floor sweating and moaning, I hadn’t suspected my illness was an allergy. One of many I was about to be diagnosed with, as in the quick succession of a single month, most food groups would be slashed over in caution tape, and cafes, brasseries, taquerias, diners, cake shops, and tapas bars would become anathema. How could I have suspected it? I was told allergies were for little kids who get hives when they ate strawberries or who might die if someone brought a snickers bar onto a trans-Atlantic flight. Not for grown women who’d just turned thirty-one and celebrated at the Versailles Ball, twirling the halls where once upon a time Princes shat and Ladies fanned the summer away, and where now, mostly, tourists tried to see if they could get away with touching something.

I’d sat on the grass in the palaqce gardens while the day had risen, and relished the taste of green on the air, the wet wiggly feeling of the strands against my calves, beneath the petticoats, enjoying the cool wet of dirt and discomfort the way I had when I was a child. We lose that, somewhere. The ability to enjoy the gross, the unclean. I used to eat grass. Now, I feared tick bites even with woolen socks on.

Only childhood and illness bring you back to the comforts of the ground. Fistfuls of grass and silt at soccer practice, wailing despair when they changed the field to stinging, stinking plastic turf. And then again, throwing myself against the chilly, textured kitchen tiles with gusto, fingering the gritted crags of concrete between each, learning their exact sandpaper roughness, pressing my brow down to soak in its rawness, the resistance making me feel soft, its powdery-outside smell reminding me: Live, live, live. Breathe, breathe, breathe.

I survived attack. And the next. And the next. I survived them all the way until I was given the list of the thirty-six foods and I was convicted deadly-allergic to. I survived in the ambulance, choking on tar my body had made from green beans, and I outlasted the cold milk that made me delirious. The doctors armed me with a rapier: The épi pen goes in the thigh. Stab hard. Auto-inject. Hold for ten seconds. You may throw up. You do throw up. You try to teach your people to use it, the people close to you, just in case. They reply that you’d better do it yourself. They could never hurt you. A strange thing to say, when the alternative is a slow and disquieting strangulation. Every new eruption, gasping, you remind them again how to use it, and they remind you again that they are conscientious objectors. You get invited out less and less. But that’s no one’s fault, no one’s onus, but the shrimp.

On that afternoon in Paris, which slipped eventfully into evening, my father had held me on the floor and rocked with me. He would be gone a few months later. Illness took him away, but only in theory, not in practice. A late-life crisis. When he learned that his heart was a ticking time bomb, something inside started tallying the remaining sand in his hourglass and with panic, he looked numbly to his old daughter with her new illnesses, and the older wife with her newer lines, and opted to trade the life he’d built for the refreshment of a rescue puppy and a woman three decades his junior. He’d shed his countdown days in an aureole of borrowed youth. Good on him, probably. No more family vacations ruined by shellfish and tenderness, tiles and talk.

After the third attack, and before the diagnosis, I stopped eating. The fat melted off of me, and I obtained that elusive “summer body” they brag about on London tube ads by the end of August. I went swimming. I closed my eyes in the pool and feared the ire of invisible sharks. I could sense the power of their phantom bodies in every tremble of water. On deck, I dreaded the fragrant clams being served for lunch. I looked amazing as I starved, but it didn’t give me that same corset posture. I opened my purse to pay for sparkling water, which I filled my days and stomach with neurotically, hiding from the sustenance that had abused me, on witness protection from my Five-a-Day. Unzipping it, I found confetti from Versailles still stuck in the bag’s lining, dying the white leather interior garishly. Red here, blue there. I had to pry big flakes of it from off my coins. The dye soaked into my thumb pads in the heat.

Glitter, sickness, and confetti you carry with you carry with you long after their moment. They are what sticks.

– Madison Salters