Single and Vulnerable

The Islanders were getting spray tans, dialed to the maximum flow control. Their veneers were being set. Their personal trainers were on around-the-clock call. Their bikini lines waxed to prepubescence, they boarded jets to Fiji. These bombshells were ready to be broadcast to some 3 million screens as contestants on the eighth season of Love Island U.S., their lives neatly organized by the neon confines of the Villa. My life was in the hands of a doctor at CityMD on Fulton Street in central Brooklyn. I had a cat hair lodged so deeply in my eye, it required a 15-minute extraction—my punishment for being, in Love Island parlance, “single and vulnerable.”