I become infatuated with writers as others do with their lovers; I pour my thoughts, my time, my interest, over their printed forms. This month it's Virginia Woolf-- I visualize her clearly, the scraping of a knife-edged fountain pen against paper a trifle denser than the norm, tinged with colour of clotted cream, heavy footed with the scent of linens on a summer afternoon. A cigarette, rolled by fluttering hands-- fingers spotted with age and madness. Mrs. Dalloway, a London hostess. . . Jacob, a boy, just a boy, curled up inside his thoughts like a pearl-pink seashell. Orlando, a slim nymph of a man-woman bearing Vita Sackville West's unmistakable perfume. The freshness of style, the sense of laughter and tears mingling on the clear sparkle of a November afternoon.

And I watch, lips soft in an adoring smile. Fingers clasped longingly, all for a woman with deepset, haunted eyes, and I wonder what little aspect of herself she'll infuse into my character when this draws to a close. For novelist, poets, playwrights can no sooner leave me without an imprint of change than the closing of love's page can not shape the whimsies of a belief. Oh, Michael Cunningham, shall I write you a thank you note on perfumed cards for arranging this second meeting with Mrs. Woolf's acquaintance?

I know it's an awful cliche, but Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Sometimes I think that if I'm enshrined in this little pale green room any longer, trapped with previously beloved letters to a forgotten dream, I will lose sight of everything. Frustration sinks under my fingers, and it's all I can do to not pull all the pretty china knickknacks off the shelf and hurl them deliberately towards the white lace canopy. I want to possess more than these little snatches of greatness. I'm so tired-- there's no other word for it-- of being a solitary difference among like minds. An art gallery, a bookshop, an overpriced cup of mint cocoa before window-shopping a boutique.

I inadvertently beheaded a dead rose earlier.

How ironic.

My life is folded up in bits of paper and faded perfume, heaps of brightly coloured yarn everyone admires but no one wants to knit together. You have choices, I think, and what an icy verb that is, to choose. You can tear up the glimmer-gloss snatch of verse, or pick up a wine glass full of fizzy water and leave it empty on a Henry James novel. You can be sensible, like the rest of the girls, and study the fairy-tale-white pages of some bridal magazine, or you can flip through Vogue and Elle with a lazy hand, tracing glossy pages and unopened perfume samples that permeate the words. I remember, once, in a time that's tucked away in a wicker suitcase in the corner of my room, when I wanted to be just like them, knowing instinctively who they are. And knowing. Knowing that I couldn't, that it would come to forcing a stone into my pocket and walking to the river's edge.

Strange and sad and a just a little funny, thinking of the change, of those creeping moments in time when I learned to articulate it, when I realized that the world is full of people that are falling.* I stumble firmly towards something greater. And I keep looking furtively from side to side, afraid my old self will be standing there with that quiet unhappiness. If I was a Woman like Frida Kahlo, I would paint, vivid curls of colour, two women, one staring silently, mouth tucked into an downcast smile. The other with her chin tucked into a wave of golden-brown hair that still smells faintly of aloe and tea tree oil and peppermint, watching. People become part of me, linger on my skin, press themselves on my fingertips, so it becomes not me anymore, but Camille-and-her-and-him-and-her-and-him-and-me. But I must implore you, don't you think? Don't ask me to hold onto you, because all I think is to scream no matter the angst, that it's

(impossible enough to hold onto myself).

*David's Redhaired Death