[...] The magazine used to send me on trips to nice hotels in foreign cities that I was probably never going to visit on my own, and once, in London, I stayed two extra days just because I couldn’t bear to get back on a plane after my two-hour interview. I changed my ticket (never once did I book the trip for longer, I merely extended the stay) so that I could stay two days extra. My daughter was eight months old at the time. But it wasn’t just that I was tired, and it wasn’t just that it was unreasonable to ask me to go to Europe from New York for two days. It was because I felt like the hotel, the city, the aloneness, these were times where I could feel my skin again; I could feel my body again. I existed again without context—without a stroller, without a man holding my hand. I wouldn’t wear my ring on these trips. It wasn’t because I wanted to fuck around. It was because when I was on airplanes my fingers got cold and skinny and so my ring would drop off and I couldn’t take the panic of worrying that I’d lost it. But also maybe it was the other thing, the context thing, I don’t know. Put it this way: You can feel your body for the first time in a long time, you can feel your skin, then suddenly you can also feel this ring around your finger and the weight of it is suddenly unbearable.