If you saw me, you might think, Maybe she’s not just a weird loner! Maybe she collects exotic seashells or rebuilds old pocket watches so that they run backward or draws blueprints of impossible imaginary cathedrals or something! She’s a foot soldier in the war on bland conformity, marching to the beat of her own drum, et cetera, et cetera. But you’d be 100 percent wrong. I was just about as close to nobody as you could get. Nothing to see here. Move along. It was like I’d become a ghost without having to go through the messy intermediate step of actually dying.
