Labels, label, labels, which I ripped from the necks of my purchases because I knew how pointless that rendered them. I’d pick fights with the frightened outfits. Ha ha ha, you’re stupider than me: a Prada sweater with no Prada label in it, castrated cashmere. I tortured my clothes thus, as though plucking limbs from a daddy longlegs. You used to be a high-priced Helmut Lang dress? Well, you’re mine now, bitch.

Halston, Gucci … Fiorucci! It was a Sister Sledge reunion passing unnoticed on my bedroom floor. And me, barely more noticeable, under dirty sheets, with smeared mascara and a toothache. “Oh look, wow! She’s the saddest junkie!” I sang zestfully to myself between sobs. My drug dealer looked around the room and decided that he couldn’t let me go on like this. So he called up the deli and had them deliver toilet paper.

“A four-pack,” he said grandly, “of extra soft,” putting his arm around my shoulder.

John doesn’t take drugs at all. He doesn’t drink or even smoke. He’s doing this to put himself through med school.

“John,” I wailed. “I’ve got a headache. I mean a toothache. And I hate my knees touching. I hate the feel of my hair falling on my face. My eyelashes are scratchy. I … I … my life hurts.”

People of an especially tough disposition are often described as being “thick-skinned.” I think I am a skin too thin. I cannot be here now. I cannot Be Here Now. While I’m on the phone to someone, crying, I’m always flicking through my address book and trying to get off the phone so I can ring someone else and cry all over again. I always stall on C. Sebastian Chase: home number, home address, work number, fax number, number at mother’s, address at mother’s, e-mail, and cell. I’m waiting for the day when I realize purely by chance that all of Sebastian’s numbers are out of date and I didn’t know because I haven’t used them in so long, or even stopped to look at them. I started to cry, but John didn’t notice because I hadn’t stopped.