I had prepared to embrace this unease. Finally, I told myself, I had before me the opportunity I wanted. I could look upon unfamiliar faces and pretend to be anyone. I could be extroverted, easygoing, a tabula rasa. Yet when the moment came I failed, as I knew I would, to see myself beyond what I’d been until now: solitary, a formless presence in a foreign world. I accepted this in the way one accepts scientific fact—unfeelingly, without any resentment toward a truth that, though previously unrealized, had always existed.
