The Girl Who Collects Facades.

Her life had turned into a masquerade.

Her aim was to obscure the self - to conceal behind masks. Her means were not lies, for she had no talent for fiction. She merely let the various possibilities of herself emerge, live and die - all in a single day. Every night she climbed on that stage, as a brunette, as a blonde, as a fiery redhead. Facilely she removed each article of clothing, while each onlooker imagined her assuming a distinct role for him - a Goddess, a damsel, a slave, a child in need of loving, an erotic promise, an object of fantasy. Nakedness was her favourite guise; her vocation itself, a celebration of human yearning.

Each night she would choose carefully, an adept lover from among the beholders - the one whose eyes didn't easily give away the role he had chosen for her. Every lover, in his act of love-making, was an aide in discovering a new indentity of her evanescent self. She would play the character well - a sinner, a savior, a deity, a juvenile, a voyeur. Until the time came to dismiss him, to pull away the facade and to add the mask safely to the collection.

Contrary to the precedent of the fairy tale, it was at midnight that she turned into a princess; and the bed into an unbreachable fortress from which lovers were hurriedly evicted, their proposals of making love and breakfast in the mornings, slightly dismissed. A shared meal was both unnecessary and unceremonious. To wake up each morning, naked and quite alone among satin sheets, was the first sacred rite of self worship. Satin slipped revealing a perfect form as she moved among wood and marble. The playthings of the night before, the only evidence and reminders of who she had been, were neatly returned to the drawer.

The last of the disgruntled neediness that had built up like a stalagmite, over years of believing in the cause for ineffability and perpetuation of love, had eventually been dispensed away. And no one had noticed, not even she herself. Until one night a noble proposition by a lover - an insistence on spooning through the night - which was obviously declined, had brought it to her attention that there had been no lasting love, because the need had been felt only for lovers and not for love itself.

The only permanent thing was the fortress, to which she returned each night.