Today is March 14th and I'm sitting at my desk. It's painted blue. Not your classic robin's egg blue, not baby blue, not sky blue or midnight blue or ocean blue. It's more like "sorry, but this is the only color left" blue. Gray blue. It's got this air of loneliness to it, undoubtedly because of its lengthy shelf life, but it's pretty nonetheless. Maybe I bought it because it reminded me of myself. Or maybe just because the boy at the store was cute. Or maybe both. I'm chewing the sides of my fingers. I used to do it so much that they got callused, and now I rip the calluses off with my teeth. But not rip. Chew. I chew and gnaw on them and the calluses increase in size, and then I go and peel the skin off the bottom of my feet. The dead skin, not the live skin. The part that's flaky and white, that you hardly feel when you pull off. When I was little I took an extra long time in the bathtub because I noticed that the white, dead skin would be present on my feet after they were wet for significant periods. Then I peeled. Mere, you're stalling. You're stalling. Just tell the story. I'm a genius when it come to introductions. I can introduce all day. "Hello! My name is Meredith! This is a book I wrote! Are you single!" But I can barely get into the actual story. When I was in sixth grade I wrote a twenty-page essay on the Mallard duck, but the first four pages were just BS about how cute ducks are. The conclusion took five pages. If this is another Mallard duck essay, you have my God-given permission to find the nearest loaf of stale bread and shove it into my mouth. Just tell the freaking story, Mere. I'm getting to it.