Making an picture of myself I can stand to look at is daunting.  The thickness of my waist, protruding softness of my front, and sparse strands of grey hair retreating from my forehead are tangible evidence that twenty years of living with early menopause has never, for one moment, grown less painful.  Yet every year, I find myself drawn to some leafy place where it seems possible to simultaneously emerge and disappear into something mundane and lovely, and I long to find evidence of my self in that place.  Foliage and inflorescence distract me from my disfigured internal image, while a few feet away the camera sees a world that is as different from my inner reality as it can be.  It is still hard to let go of what I wish I could see – a self arrived at by a less barren, lonely route, whose time among the potent and the green hadn’t ended so long ago.  A wish that I could show you something that would dissolve the barricade between you and me.   Those moments are so rare.