These magazines could tell me which clothes and shoes to wear, how to have my hair styled in order to fit in. They could show me the right kind of makeup to buy and how to apply it. This way, I would disappear into everywoman acceptability. I would not be stared at. The goal, ultimately, was successful camouflage as a human woman.

How might one introduce luxury and pampering into the process of shaping and painting a nail? It was, literally, beyond my imagining.

paucity

epistolary level.

Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high.

sybaritic

She had tried to steer me towards vertiginous heels again – why are these people so incredibly keen on crippling their female customers? I began to wonder if cobblers and chiropractors had established some fiendish cartel.

Emily Dickinson’s beautiful poem is called Wild Nights – Wild Nights!, and combines two elements of which I am inordinately fond: punctuation, and the theme of finding, at long last, a soul mate.

sartorial