These things are important, I tell myself: watches and mirrors. In the glass, my face changes meaninglessly. Here dark, here vague, here fat with familiar thoughts, the flesh stretched and shining over pillowed bone. So pale and strange a curve of cheek, so well-remembered a fall of hair. Flat eyes, sometimes -- always -- full of reflected numbers, greenish corners distorted into crescent moons buried in the jellied cornea. The hours are dissolving into blind increments while I observed.

I used to prefer digital clocks, the seconds displayed like soldiers, because it made it easier to find palindromes in the numbers. 8:13:18, 1:41:41, each a perfect moment. And dreaming, I peeled colons off one by one, the dots bleeding over my hands. It was, they were: quirks to round out my personality, fictions braided into my posture, individuality beaded like water on skin.

But that was then, and somehow for all the clocks and mirrors my brain has come loose since, trailing blood vessels and oily neurons. What fun it is to continue on, unmoored.

Dropping the consistency of metaphor and images, I have other news:

The doctor thought I would be taller than I am, but I've stopped growing, I'm pretty sure it's permanent, in the way that when a plant breaks for lack of a pole to curl around, it's permanent. And my mother gave me lotions but smearing on a lovely, curling white layer of slime doesn't budge the tan line on my wrist.

Stasis remains glorious, to my eternal shock.

Tell you a secret, though: I mock the suicides next door, but in all honesty, I'd not mind the prospect of ending if only I could stop having dreams about ectoplasmic sex. Planned Parenthood never warns you about how hard it is to balance across ghostly hips without falling through. And there's nothing quite so awkward as a transparent p***s sticking through your ribs like a dripping knife in the moonlight.