I don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?" Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, "Tenderness.

Over coffee and orange juice the embryonic suicide brightens visibly.

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

I want to kill myself, to escape from responsiblity, to crawl abjectly back into the womb.

I wondered what I thought I was burying.

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.