All she was asking for was comfort, a little relief. In that sense, perhaps she was no different from an addict. Weren’t all addicts looking for relief from some invisible pain? Weren’t all people?

Ayn Rand.

as a model, Lucky was used to people taking pleasure in proving she was an idiot. It was a kind of protection against inadequacy, she assumed; if she was pretty but dumb, they could still feel superior, even a little righteous, finding, in their own lack of marketable beauty, a confirmation of their higher intelligence. But if the two weren’t

asceticism,

This is right for you, it would say. This is wrong. And when it spoke to her, she felt so supremely looked after, so deeply and existentially okay, its source could only be divine.

Sometimes she said it was a dull, low ache, foreboding and inevitable, like the darkening of the sky before a storm. Sometimes it was hot electric bursts that shot and pinged through her, leaving her doubled over and gasping for air. Sometimes she said it felt like crashing waves gathering momentum and receding, her insides the beaten and

largesse

“I miss her and I miss her and I miss her,” she began. “And I wait for the feeling to end because every other feeling has ended, no matter how intense, no matter how hard—but this won’t. There’s just no end to the missing. There was life before and there’s life now. And I can’t seem to accept it. I can’t accept that I’ll have to miss her forever.

same patient impassivity of a mule swatting flies away with its tail.