I’ve started collecting magazines and newspapers. Every backdated print edition I can get my hands on from when the news first began covering the murders, from People, the New York Post, the Daily News, the Daily Mail. Every day a new package comes filled with papers, bulky with them, and I sit in my room and leaf through and clip. Clip away at headlines and images of Tom and Odilie and Penelope and me, those words and pictures once so hurtful now reduced to a dull throb. I clip and I clip and I paste onto creamy, deckle-edge paper, collages of my head conjoined with Odilie’s, eating fruit from the ad next to a story defaming my name.

I lose myself in it, this manic collaging. Quinn thinks I’ve lost the plot. He mutters to himself when he comes home, knocks on my door and finds me tucked away in my room, X-Acto knife on paper, more and more ideas coming to me the longer I stay up. The more the project grows, the more news stories and new images I find.

This is the action, the activity, the brain distraction I’d been craving for over a year now. The plotting and planning and executing skills that I’d honed so well as I was building my career had floundered, grown dusty from disuse. But now, now it feels like I have something to do. A purpose again.

And the more I concentrate on the collaging, the more I can see something forming. An inkling of an idea, called forth from the past, when my college professors all told me that I had an eye, when I spent my time experimenting with shapes, colors and textures in art classes. There’s something happening here, a manipulated vision that I think could help me in the end. I am certain I can turn this manic art therapy of mine to my advantage.

Something had flickered in me after seeing Hannah Hoch’s work, reading articles about famously defamed women who took the fall for men’s transgressions. How Monica Lewinsky, Yoko Ono, had finally gotten some apologies from the masses. I hadn’t practiced fine art in ages, but I could, I would. This wasn’t going to be some one-off tacky tribute collection; I could monetize this, somehow, some way. I just wasn’t sure how yet.

This constant motion, the disembodied act of continually slicing myself and the others off the page, I need it. I need it because I’m suddenly on a rampage against Thomas Newburn.