A three-day weekend featuring a surprise visit from Viola. She used the code knock and tricked me into letting her in. Five minutes later she’d unearthed my scrapbook of pregnant women and my black market pachinko machine. How does she do it. I feel more than naked around her, like maybe I’m sprawled out on the operating table and she’s taking polaroids of things inside me that nobody’s ever seen — numbering them, making a flipbook, always turning it into some project as if that makes it OK.

“I’m drawing a caricature of you,” she says. “I’m going to get a job at the county fair and I need to practice.” I offer to give her a succinct list of my hobbies and interests, so she can have me wearing little lederhosen and kicking an oversized soccer ball, but she says no, “I’m drawing you how you see yourself.” The results are, naturally, horrifying. We go to the park and every customer is equally horrified and willing to pay top dollar, roughly folding the portrait into their bodies and fleeing, desperate to get somewhere safe and study it for hours. I ask her how she can be so accurate and she says it’s like writing a horoscope.

We don’t sleep together this time since my new year’s resolution was to cut down on the post-coital crying jags. She nods solemnly at my decision and makes a quick note of it in her sketchpad. She left this morning and the day suddenly seems ridiculous and unbearable.