The women of my life have told me that there comes a day where you wake up and don’t recognise yourself in the mirror. Somewhere in the years one night your girlhood leaves you and in her place appears the face of someone you maybe once knew. It’s been said to me like a threat and not a promise, and so that is how I’ve taken it. I know it’ll come, still, when I forget to look out for it. But it is something to do: to look at myself constantly and closely, monitoring the changes as they accrue, trying to cushion the shock of one ending—of which in life there are too many.

Over dinner a friend tells me about a procedure she’s starting.