This is a really nice obituary for Aaron.

My eyes were dilated last week. On purpose, I mean. I went to the eye doctor for the first time in years just to humor my internet-assisted hypochondria, which had been pretty eyeball-obsessed ever since my trippy visual migraine experience this spring. After that, I began to pay more attention to the little floaty things in my vision and decided, thanks to some conscientous web research, that it all had to mean that my retinas were slowly withering away like grapes in the fridge, and I had to call this to some noble doctor’s attention ASAP so that he could perform laser surgery on me. Not like I wanted surgery, of course, but when your eyes are turning into rotten cocktail onions you do what you gotta do, right? And figured I could use some new glasses, too.

Everyone I knew kept warning me about the eye dilation part; how I was supposed to wear sunglasses, avoid driving, and sit in dark rooms for hours and hours. It sounded terrible to me. I imagined the second I had the drops put in my eyes I would surely clutch my head screaming while the world turned day-glo colors! I’d be knocked down by the glare and I’d have to go live underground! I would have to cancel my plans, seeing as how I was sentenced to at least half a day in some kind of gloomy Goth exile. I was late to my appointment on purpose.

But it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t even know what was happening until the nurse led me to a dim room and left me alone for awhile. They hadn’t explained why I was there: I thought the appointment was over and now they were allowing me to just sit in this nice room for a spell to calm down from the mild trauma of having my eyeballs touched. It wasn’t until I noticed that my knitting was blurry that I realized they’d done something, and when I went back in the exam room I looked in the mirror and straight into my soul. I looked like I was tweaking on meth. But then according to this article, I was hot, so go figure.

I was given a clean bill of eyeball health and then I wound up wearing sunglasses for a little while, maybe an hour. Mostly, though, the world appeared to have slightly harder edges. Something was different about the perspective; objects were where they were supposed to be but I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything had been taken away and then put back a little wrong.

It all looked like how I’ve been feeling recently. I spent months curled in my own head and only recently have I had the chance to crawl out; now everything is different.

I knew Aaron only briefly. We knew each other from a couple of Gaper’s Block events and then hung out at Simon’s one night in early June. Later he sent me a postcard at Ragdale, an occasional nice email; he struck me as extremely bright even as I sensed that he was a little adrift. I’d hoped he would find his way, and it wasn’t until I’d heard he was missing that I began to understand how far out he was. All I can say is I wish he’d made it back.

Ten Ways In Which Writing This Damn Book Was Just Like Having a Baby:
It took months and months to produce.
People kept asking me when it was due.
It gave me a taste for foods I’d never really cared about before, like clementines and buffalo wings.
It made me gain a distressing amount of weight.
It filled me with flutteringly happy anticipation occasionally mingled with sheer keening terror.
It made me inexplicably cry at things on the radio.
It made me miss work, and more of it than I’d planned on missing.
It screwed up my sleep patterns.
And my social life.
And all sense of normal existence.

Ten Ways In Which Writing This Damn Book Was Nothing At All Like Having a Baby:
Did not have to push book out of body.
Did not need to have book surgically removed from body.
Did not, and it bears repeating, have a physical entity of any kind pass through any sort of portal in my body, by which I mean neither a pre-existing opening nor one specially created for the occasion.
Book makes noise only when dropped, and then still works okay afterwards.
Book not even in the remotest danger of being abducted by a religious cult or carried off by dingoes.
Book did not wind up five pages shorter for every cigarette I smoked.
Book will not, in a few short years’ time, develop the ability to dance ballet just the way I’m sure I would have had I only been given the proper encouragment and a pretty pretty tutu, alas.
Book does not have that sweet baby smell.
Book, on the other hand, will not vomit on me or anything else.
Book will not pee itself, anywhere, ever, and especially not spectactularly into the air.

My phone rang today at work.
“This is Wendy,” I answered.
“This is your mother,” my mom said.
I wondered what she wanted.
“Well, you haven’t updated your site since Thursday the 26th,” she said. What is with you, young lady? her tone said.

I am fine. There just hasn’t been anything going on in my life that I felt like sharing with several hundred people. I know that’s usually never stopped me before, but then again, while working on the book this summer I went through a couple of bad spells when I was trying to write for several thousand imaginary people I’d conjured up out of Amazon.com customer reviews of other people’s books, so that every time I finished writing a paragraph I could hear comments (okay, see them, I guess, or mentally experience them in a synaesthetic fashion in which the voices of my hypothetical Amazon bad reviewers all wind up sounding like Juliette Lewis on I Love The 80s, the way she rambles on) like, “It wasn’t THAT bad… but I didn’t get the part with the road trip, like how she never really DESCRIBED what kind of car she was driving and stuff… like, she did not paint a vivid picture with her words like you’re supposed to,” and in my mind I’m nodding along thinking, oh crap, she’s right; I suck. I didn’t have that in my head all the time, but just enough at times to make me a little crazy, so after I turned in the first draft I became a bit too fond of the mental quiet that comes with not having to cough up written accounts of your own life.

So if it’s one thing I’ve learned: don’t read Amazon reviews when you’re trying to write a book. Don’t read other reviews either. They’re other people’s problems.

I’ve also learned: just because you are writing a book about body image will not prevent you from losing your shit when you gain at least ten pounds in the process. You can call it the Method Approach to writing, but still, YOU WILL BE PISSED.