The previous day, February 12th, every small movement was exacting and she was forced to go to the drugstore instead of a pot dealer's home since this inward insurrection was so great. She suggested that Hispanic Betty drive her to the doctor. When the woman kept trying to insert the key in the same wrong position within the ignition and at last primed a bit of gas into the icy cold vehicle with the accelerator instead of pumping on the brake peddle, she still had no confidence in her. Lacking this confidence, they switched to a taxi. Throughout that day she was vertiginous and lost, not knowing how to center herself or what to center herself around. The day had been like walking around in an eye-stinging blizzard. Now it was February 13th and Gabriele was outside drawing the creatures of love depicted by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium: the hubris of whole beings that Zeus was ready to slice in half and those already cut and diminished desperately searching for their "better halves." She cynically snubbed love as hungers for sex and that personal domain of wanting to love and be loved, which were more hungers and more neediness. Then two things dawned on her. They were opposing ideas that refused to be irrelevant. They refused to be vanquished from the kingdom. They refused to stand outside begging like a Buddhist mendicant at 6:00 a.m. in Laos. They were the making of a more self- actualized Gabriele. She realized that there was great beauty in two people caring about each other for it was nature's plan to use selfish hungers to create that vulnerable spot within the human psyche that needed consistency and permanence among other things; and that she too yearned for a studly apparition who would touch her and by his touch make her real. She felt so empty within these past two years of celibacy. There were days in which she felt that her pristine intellectualism was an absolutely drab prison cell. If someone were to touch her on her shoulder--just a simple human touch--she would not be wallowing in the sludge of her thoughts. She would not be masticating them like a worm. Taking a break on the porch, she began reading one of her textbooks but soon she fell asleep because of the decongestant she had taken earlier for a cold. For a minute she dreamed that the makeup on her face was an oddly pleasant sensation like baby powder on an infant's buttocks and then the powder began to constrict her face into feigned smiles. She ran into the kitchen and grabbed a scouring pad to abrade away the stiffness before it all began to make her face crack. When she woke up she saw the mail truck drive away. Then the door opened and a woman stepped out with a stack of envelopes in her hands. "Hispanic Betty," Gabriele asked, "The mail has already come?" "Aqui esta, senora." "Anything important?"