So the story begins, City Dweller, Professional fella.

Your face is merging and blurring; pictures of you aren't what I remember you like and they're showing a different one. But it's still an image I feel a residual fondness for, though I know the real thing isn't that, and it's the real thing I'm thinking of that I want most. The pictures of you are just false icons; they're posed for fun, and look almost unnatural. The real you is sedate and comfortable that lies beside me in an alcove when we fall asleep together; and that isn't how you look there, loud and painted. But loud and painted you is still a piece of you, and I appreciate it as well as the rest.

I think I have been reading too much Margaret Atwood for my own good. She's very talented but I can't help feeling slightly annoyed with the fact that all of her heroines are the same; disdaining, injured and vaguely wistful, and wise, and melancholy. Of course, I am jealous, of these fictional women. I find myself becoming irritated because I'm not up to scratch with a woman in a book. Elaine Risely is bright and seductive without knowing that she is; disdain comes so easily, so does aloofness. I wish I could be aloof but I simply care too much about trivial things; everything that she cares about is invested with some sort of depth, everything she describes. She lives in a different world. I cannot be that way; because I refuse to let people sink beneath me. Every chance she gets she places someone under her in a mysteriously secret way that must be plain to everyone else; she is the protagonist, miles above everyone else. I worry that I am one of the flabby flittering flake girls that she muses over, who produce halfhearted work. I worry about what we would do if we met, and how boring and menial she would find me, and she is completely fictional; and even in a book, I find her tiresome and self-involved, so I should not care.

It's exhausting being in a constant competition with everything around me, even inanimate paper women.