I swing from impassioned engagement to despair and back again. My skin doesn't know how to handle the stress. Pimples emerge, the likes I haven't seen since my early teenagerhood, when my boy-cousins and brother nicknamed me Rocky Mountains. (That sobriquet wasn't much ha ha hee hee until later, when at last in their pubescence, these lads acquired spotty countenances that out-mountained even my since-cleared one.)

To cope, I pace, don costumes, flip through a dozen books at the same time, count the trains that go by, decipher the sounds emitted by the factory next door, brew green tea, make three desserts I'll never eat, scrub the bathtub, sort the piles on my desk, listen to Bollywood soundtracks and Vespertine over and over again. I am Eloise at her most restless, except I cannot order caviar and a thimbleful of champagne from the concierge downstairs. It is raw-ther bothersome.




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