So I’m plain and I don’t mind it, for that reason, and others.

Abandoned houses, abandoned women. Thank you, Sharon Olds, for Stag’s Leap, and thank you to the friend who put me to bed in her spare room with a copy. Thank you, Alanis Morissette, for singing “Thank you, India,” during our sock hops late at night. Thank you, weed. Thank you, humor. Thank you, Facebook, a woman vamping in front of Lenin’s statue, in her full-length fur and red leather pants, your basic riotous pussy. My friend Greta, who kept her own counsel and didn’t think it was that big a deal when a couple broke up due to a third party who was exceedingly young, suddenly yelling over the telephone, Fur, are you fucking kidding me, she wears fur? and then bringing me a pan of vegan brownies.

M., sternly, during a phone call: “You need to stop calling her that. It’s beneath you.” And then more pleadingly: “But anyway, we like Pussy Riot, don’t we?”

And me, sharply: “Apparently we do.”

See? Humor.

I am allowing the hurt feelings to be ascendant for once in my life, not stuffing them down, the way we used to say back in group therapy. Where everyone was a woman, and everyone, even the leaders, sat in a circle in a subtly lit room, all of us lotused on our cushions except when we were beating them with bats. Those were the nineties, when you could beat the stuffing out of a pillow in front of a group of interested others while still secretly keeping your own stuffing intact. Where the women would stand up at the end and grasp wrists to make a human cradle for you, and you could, if you were brave, lie back and be rocked from side to side while you cried like a baby. Crying like a baby is a cliché, unless you’re the one doing it. Now it feels like rain. Just rain that won’t stop, the daylong, weeklong kind where the ground gets soaked to the point that the trees topple. And then when it’s over, everything feels better, rinsed and sparkling. Allow the hurt feelings to be ascendant (“Your face is so…open, Jo”) because it’s better, one assumes, and it is also more realistic. The trees are toppled, yes, but now there’s space to feel the new life, what it means to be free of someone else’s judgment, of their categorizing, of the insistence that I be other. I am not other anymore. I am the actual one.

Which is the loneliest number.

On the Arizona desert trail alone, the way they tell you never to be, mountain-goating up stone steps, over boulders; my legs are feeling so good compared to the rest of me that I can’t slow down. Hawks, vultures, a jackrabbit with parchment ears; the only sound my sneakers and my breath. The trail rises and me with it, sliding in the scree down the other side, regaining traction, and then suddenly just ahead, something that registers as a scrap of fabric, like a striped scrunchie someone had dropped, out of place against the trail.