On the plane to Chicago for my twofold mission, I dozed and in my half sleep I thought of Robin. I was supposed to be on a plane back to him and his world. Who was there now? Was someone else already in my chair and, if so, had he forgotten me completely?

I couldn’t say I missed him, couldn’t say I missed that whole warped world, but part of me, and not just the Patty Hearst part, had cared for him. Part of me remembered his face at odd times, remembered eating peaches off the hotel breakfast tray, the morning light cutting across the sheets in hot, white stripes while he dressed for work.

The girls in Brunei weren’t the only ones with a role to play. Robin, too, had a life in which he was called upon to play role after role. Even princes tire of being princes sometimes. There were moments late at night when he was sick of the party, moments in the morning when he lingered an extra ten minutes in bed before complying with his rigid schedule, moments when he drove his car too fast on curvy country roads and I wondered if he wanted to just keep driving. These were the moments that crept into my unguarded consciousness when I was sleepy or spacing out on a walk through the park or staring out the window of a plane.

I thought, too, of Andy at home. He hadn’t seen me off at the airport. He had been working, of course. He barely came home when I was awake anymore. I placed my bets on all the wrong horses. I loved only the ones who left me with a belly full of longing. At love, I was a jackass. But they say the ultimate tattoo is the one that changes the jackass into a zebra. I hoped for nothing less. My first tattoo is a big tattoo, a life-changing tattoo. It’s a purple snake spine that spirals out from my navel and across my whole stomach, blossoming into a garden of flowers that crawls down my left thigh and decorates my entire pussy with thorny monster teeth. You can now find photographs of my tattoo in a bunch of tattoo books.

Before we started, Guy sagely tried to steer me away from the idea of a pussy tattoo.

“Maybe you want to get something on a different part of your body until you know what it feels like.”

I told him that I was quite sure of myself, that I wanted to be transformed.

He shrugged. It wasn’t the province of tattoo artists to stop people from being stupid and melodramatic. Guy was famous for his ectomorphic sci-fi landscapes and exquisitely detailed poisonous gardens. Even if my first tattoo isn’t in the wisest location, at least it’s a beautiful tattoo.

One of the many unoriginal questions heavily tattooed people get asked when walking down the street is, “Does it hurt?” My friend in San Francisco wears a T-shirt that reads, FUCK YES IT HURTS. My whole nervous system misfired. When Guy tattooed my ribs, it felt like he was working on my neck. I twitched and broke a sweat and eventually I settled into some kind of accord with the pain. They tell you to lean into it. When your insides have been all twisted, the pain of a tattoo becomes a metaphor: This is unbearable and yet this I can live through.

The next day I felt like I had a terrible road rash on my stomach, and I also had a slight fever, but I was elated. I had my membership card to a new club. Guy, his girlfriend, and I took a day off. The three of us ate a handful of psychedelic mushrooms and went to the science museum to see an exhibit of giant insects. We walked under a cerulean Chicago sky and the wind came off the lake and blew through the too-thin dress I wore, helping to numb my burning skin.

When we entered the museum, the woman in the ticket booth asked Guy how much his tattoos cost. This is the second most popular question after “Did that hurt?” That day with Guy, I learned my first lesson in having tattoos: When confronted by oglers, you need to have your routine down, whatever it’s going to be. They treat you like a freak. So what? So what are you gonna do about it? What would Patti Smith do about it?

Guy looked like Al Jourgensen, but with violet-blue eyes. He responded to the woman with a growl and a milk-turning, I-will-sacrifice-your-baby-to-Satan glare. I had spent two days with Guy and found him equal parts sweet science nerd and acid-dropping hippie. He was the nicest guy. Satan would have turned him away at the gate. The scariness was completely an act, but it shut her right up.

Inside, the insects were colorful and alien and phosphorescent. I had stepped into an alternate universe. I stared at my reflection in the luminous shell of a purple scarab twice my size. Maybe it was the hallucinogenics or the fever or the fairy dust of the tattoo gods, but I swayed with a vertiginous sensation similar to the one I’d had on the balcony my first night in Singapore: There she is, the girl I want to be, real and unashamed and rendered in bold Technicolor strokes—just out of reach, but closer.

I crossed the parking lot to the shoulder of a road where I saw a fair flow of traffic and threw out my thumb, another first. There was no other option, unless I turned around and went back. I always made up for in willingness what I lacked in forethought. A black Cadillac with a mercifully non-creepy driver took me to the entrance of Highland Park Hospital, a brick structure landscaped with long beds of pink impatiens. I wandered the hallways looking for the records department, where I was met with blank stares.

“We’ve got nothing for you here,” said a woman with pearlescent green talons.

“You’re strange and extraordinary,” I said in response to her nails, a reference to my all-time favorite movie, Cabaret. She looked at me even more blankly, if that was possible.

“You know. Sally Bowles. Green nails. Strange and extraordinary.”

She didn’t know.

“You could try the County Clerk. For your birth certificate,” she said.

Of course there was nothing for me there. And I already had my official birth certificate. It told me nothing. It wiped out my history as if it had never existed.

I went to the maternity ward, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do and I would feel defeated walking out so quickly. When I looked through the glass at the babies squirming in the nursery, I felt the cold adrenaline of a shoplifter. Why did I feel like I was doing something wrong? I left with the beginning flickers of a migraine and an emotional flatline.

I had only one more lead. I considered myself an old pro at hitchhiking by that time and I hitched another ride to the address I had scrawled on a piece of loose-leaf paper. The lawns of Highland Park looked like those of the affluent suburban town in which I had grown up and they inspired the same reaction: terror. The trees were just starting to turn, their leaves edged with hints of the gaudy colors to come.

I looked at the pretty houses and stores and a sense of hopelessness overwhelmed me. I got claustrophobic and my right eye began to swim with white spots. It felt like half my brain was being probed by alien electrodes. I thought for a minute I might also be getting ready to have an asthma attack, but it was just hypochondria. Trips to the deep suburbs give me asthma and migraines and rare diseases.

The aging Jewish trophy-wife-type woman in the driver’s seat scolded me for hitchhiking and then cross-examined me about my sojourn to Highland Park. She tapped her French-tip acrylics against the steering wheel. I thought of my mother—my real mother, my adoptive mother—the thousands of carpools, the air-conditioning on high. I thought of her big black glasses with the purplish tint, her fingers, swollen with early arthritis but still shapely and perfectly manicured, wrapped around the wheel.

“I’m looking for an old friend.”

“What’s the name? I’ve lived here a hundred years. Maybe I know her. Him?”

“Her. Her name is Carrie Gardner.”

“Gardner. Maybe there was a Gardner ahead of my daughter in junior high, but I didn’t know the parents.”

I got the feeling that she was making this up. She seemed like the kind of woman who couldn’t stand to be caught without the answer.

“I never pick up hitchhikers, you know, but I could tell you were a nice girl. My daughter was at school in Michigan before she dropped out. Now she follows the Grateful Dead around. Thinks she’s an activist. Ridiculous. So smart, that kid. I figured you could have been my daughter standing there. I’d want someone safe to stop for her.”

What would my mother say? My daughter was at NYU before she dropped out. Now she flits back and forth from New York to Southeast Asia. Thinks she’s an actress. Ridiculous. So smart, that kid.

The woman consulted my creased piece of paper and dropped me off at a ranch-style suburban house, plain and assuredly middle class.

“You sure you’ll be okay?” she asked me.

“I’m fine. I’ve got a ride from here. Thanks a lot.”

I considered asking if she would wait for a minute and then drive me back to the train station. She didn’t seem like she had much to do. But I decided not to. I was pretty sure she would have said yes, but I didn’t want to talk to her anymore, didn’t want the reminder of my own mother, of the betrayal I was committing by standing on that particular square of yard.

A moonfaced woman opened the door and squinted at me, brushing a lock of hair out of her face. She told me that she had moved in only a year ago and had no information. Before she moved in, there was a family who was there three years, but she couldn’t remember their names. Maybe Carrie had stayed with the family who was there before them. Maybe the family before that. She was just guessing. Nineteen years was a long time, after all. Nineteen years of waves rolling over any sandcastles Carrie might have built there.

“Is there anyone on this block who lived here nineteen years ago?”

“Not that I know of. It’s a young block. It’s a family neighborhood,” she said. “Now, who are you, again?”

In ghost stories, it’s always some terrible tragedy that leaves a mark behind, an assault so grievous that time itself steps aside to allow for a spirit to hang around and decry the injustice. But what about our mundane personal tragedies, the prosaic injustices perpetrated without a police file, without an audience? These slip away, washed from the counters before the next family moves in their boxes of dishware. I suppose I could have stayed in the neighborhood and been a better investigative journalist, but I was suddenly nauseated, my headache growing progressively debilitating.

Hitching a ride from there to the train station proved to be harder than I had anticipated. I walked for about an hour down a long stretch of road, feeling stupid and stopping once to throw up behind a bush, before anyone stopped. Otherwise, it was uneventful. I don’t know what I had expected. Somehow it had seemed important for me to smell the smells and see the colors of that town, but all I had smelled was the same autumn, the same trees, the same hospital trays that were everywhere else. I was embarrassed by the visit to the nursery, by my own sentimentality.

On the train home, I laid my head against the window and thought of Joni Mitchell. In high school I had decided that I looked like Joni Mitchell, in spite of her delicate, elfish features. I didn’t look like her in obvious ways, but in ways only I, intimately acquainted with my own bone structure, could see. I even sang like her when I sang alone. On stage in musical-theater productions I was a classic belter, but in my secret moments, I sang just like Joni, my voice high and breathy and folksy.

I had read in Rolling Stone that Joni Mitchell gave a baby up for adoption. This baby was the child born with the moon in Cancer that she sings about in the song “Little Green.” I was certain that this baby was me. Never mind the fact that I was a Leo. Never mind the fact that the 1971 Blue album with “Little Green” on it came out two years before I was born. Never mind that I was hardly the blond and blue-eyed sprite Joni Mitchell was.

I filtered out the contradictory evidence and knew, beyond all reason, that my birth mother was Joni Mitchell. Because her spirit was the spirit I had inside me. And what I needed was not a mother who had carried me in her body. That I could live without. But I needed to find the place my heart came from. My heart refused to be an orphan forever.

I got my tattoo not to say “I wuz here,” a tag on a freeway overpass, but rather to say “Here wuz me.” Here they are, the landscapes inscribed behind my eyes. Because even when your dream slips away, your mother slips away, your baby slips away, your lover slips away—even then, you have your story. With my tattoos, I serve as witness and documentarian to myself.

After the first tattoo, I got many more. Now people often run their hands over my tattoos as if they’re braille. All this touching gets on my nerves sometimes. People who don’t know me at all will reach out and grab my arm, will run their palms over my forearms. But I get it. My tattoos are pulsing with stories. Hold your ear close to them and you’ll hear the ocean at Beach Haven, you’ll hear an insistent knocking on a door in Brunei, you’ll hear the train pulling out of the Highland Park station.

I let Highland Park disappear behind me. That town held nothing, not the smallest clue that there once had been a girl somewhere in that house pregnant with me, feeding me her thoughts, feeding me her fears, staying maybe with the last nameless family or maybe with the family before that; no one can remember.

My mission in Highland Park had been unsuccessful, but I had figured out something, at least. The air there weighed a million pounds, but riding the train out of town I felt so light. I recognized time’s shifting weight—the heaviness of the past, the lightness of the moment.

What I was looking for wasn’t in Highland Park, wasn’t in any one place. Sometimes all you need is a Joni Mitchell song to know who you are. Sometimes you find it by accident on a foreign balcony at dawn. And sometimes your story looks like the purple spine of a snake spiraling outward across your belly, etched forever under your skin.