But when I flashed my boobs, I kept the back of my shirt down. I did not raise it up entirely, not even when I was zombie-eyed and slipping off bar stools, because to do so would have been to reveal the part of myself that was seriously hidden, raw and vulnerable. It would have been to show you the moles on my back.

I was 7, maybe 8, when I discovered my back did not look like other people’s. Nothing dramatic: Black buckshot on a white canvas. But those things were like hideous scars to me.

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“I wish you’d take that thing off,” the guy said, as we both sipped our beer.

“Why?” I said, propping my bare legs on his lap. I liked that wig. It was magenta, a fiery and improbable color, and its long, flippy layers draped across my shoulders with architectural perfection.

The wig also looked surprisingly natural on me, like I was born to wear a fiery and improbable drag. I wore it to a bar on the Lower East Side, and it was such a trip to realize that every stranger believed this weird lie about me. Nobody thought I was wearing a wig, because why on earth would I be? The next day I posted a picture of myself on Facebook in that wig, and even my friends bought it. The comments exploded. Yowzah love your new hair. And the compliments were so frothy, and felt so good, that I couldn’t bring myself to puncture the magic.

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When I wasn’t arguing about '80s music in a loud bar, I was watching people do so on VH1, whose core programming in 2007 consisted of comedians cracking jokes about Teddy Ruxpin and Milli Vanilli. I couldn’t get enough of it. I’d stagger home on Friday night, flop on the futon at 2 a.m., and pass out watching “I Love the '80s,” which probably should have been called, “I Hate My Life, but I Love the '80s,” or maybe just, “Hold Me, I’m Lonely.”

Anyway, nothing gave me the creepy-crawlies like “I Can’t Fight This Feeling,” with its opening tinkle of piano, shimmery as a glitter rainbow, and its lyrics of sweaty-palmed, middle-school dance vulnerability: I can’t fight this feeling any longer, and yet I’m still afraid to let it flow / What started out as friendship has grown stronger, I only wish I had the strength to let it show.

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Yes, I carried a teddy bear with me on my swashbuckling Jack Kerouac adventure. It was a gift from my high school boyfriend, and it reminded me of being loved, and I had dragged it along the ground of the previous decade, across college and my first career and various romantic disappointments. That bear was a kind of battle armor, even as it squished up against my face.

And I needed it that night, because my mind was a haunted house of broken glass and men in ski masks lurching from the shadows. There were so many reasons to be frightened while traveling alone – 18-wheelers, lightning storms, roadside motels that reeked of death – but the most formidable was my own imagination. I told myself I’d be fine, that no one would find me here, but I was wrong, because I was startled awake by a flashlight flooding the window at 3 a.m.

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I had been trying to quit for months at that point. No wait: I’d been trying to quit for years. I would wake up on a Sunday, all cringes and stabbing pain, and I’d swear off the stuff only to crawl back on my belly in three days, maybe four. This time I’d made a formal effort, though. I was Quitting. Done. Finito. At some point, you must accept that the universe has granted you enough epic nights and drunken ragers, and I drew the line at roughly five bazillion.

My mind and my heart were at odds on this issue, however. I knew I had to stop drinking – the evidence was unambiguous – but I would find myself on a date, nervous and fidgety, or I would find myself walking from the subway to the Brooklyn brownstone I shared at the time, pulled as if by centrifugal force into the liquor store with the bulletproof glass, where the clientele bought Malibu Rum and lottery tickets, and wondering: Well, what would happen if I picked up that bottle of Cabernet?

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I suspect most couples don’t know the exact date of their first encounter. But then most couples probably don’t have a police report.

It took me a few days to decide to contact Nick. I’d been wrestling with that urge for five years now. My inbox was a shame trail of gushy letters typed after midnight, impulsive notes dashed off in the afternoon. All of them had cutesy subject lines, like the titles of Raymond Carver stories, but they should have been labeled the same thing: “Do you love me again? Have you changed your mind yet?”

But one evening in March, I sent Nick an email. My hands were trembling as I typed. It was subject lined “things you may or may not remember,” and this is what it said:

“My friend Charlotte is getting married in New Orleans on May 13, and I will be going. May 13 also happens to be the day I met you, six years ago on Royal Street with a lump on my head the size of a lime. (Life is WEIRD, right?) I'd like to see you. Is that possible?”

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But something shifted a few years ago. She became afraid of talking on the phone. Just hearing it ring could provoke panic. Maybe it was the suffocation of carrying her cellphone all day long. (“There are these tentacles in you all the time,” she said.) But she rarely answered the phone, preferring to text message, and the voice mail piled up like unopened bills dumped in a desk drawer – frightening and unknown and ever present -- until she couldn’t bear it anymore, and in a rush of guilt she would delete dozens of messages that had been left for her without even listening to them.

Sometimes she would text the person to find out what they needed: “Sorry I missed your call,” she would type, although technically she wasn’t, and technically she hadn’t. Instead, like so many people I know, she had simply stopped using her phone for the one purpose Edison intended: to speak to another person.

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His friend Andres was also there. Did I mention that? Well, I admit I didn't want Andres to be there, even though I loved him (but not in that way). Still, Andres did kind of love me in that way, so there we were, a trio of thwarted desire lying in our separate beds, and that's when Jon introduced me to Tom Waits.

It might be more accurate to say he presented me with Tom Waits. There was enough buildup for British royalty. Shhh. Stop moving. Listen to this part. Did you hear that line? I wish I could remember the song, but I suspect it was early lounge singer Tom Waits. Funny and broken and three sheets to the wind.

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"You look healthy!" they exclaim, giving me a hug, or grabbing my shoulders like an aunt at a family reunion. They say it so often and with such enthusiasm that it can have the inverse effect of upsetting me. I can't help wondering how unhealthy I used to look.

"People won't stop telling me I look healthy," I complained to my friend Mary.

She laughed. "Those assholes."

Don't get me wrong: I love compliments. But I feel a stab of mortification for the bloated, slightly sweaty woman who thought she had everyone fooled with Target hoodies and elastic waistbands. I have spent a lifetime hoping no one noticed my weight, and so it is a special terror that everyone now does. I tend to deflect in these moments. I say things like, "It's amazing what you can accomplish when you stop burying your misery in Chipotle burritos." Or I pass the weight loss off to quitting drinking, which is not a lie, since I was a beer-binger who could put away a six-pack on a Tuesday. (It's hard to keep your girlish figure when even a casual night out includes 2,000 calories in sheer lager.)

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"Isn't it strange that his profile doesn't say that he played professional soccer in Germany?" I asked my friend Mary the following day. I was sitting in her kitchen chair, where I often park myself as the two of us try to untangle some romantic mystery.

"He told you he played soccer in Germany?" She stifled a laugh. "And you believed him?"

I believed him. Over the next two weeks, as the bizarre story of Todd unfolded, this was the humbling phrase I would be forced to repeat. Yes, I believed him. I believed that he was a wealthy entrepreneur who had started his first company at the age of 20. I believed that he got a soccer scholarship to a liberal arts college in upstate New York and later traveled all over Europe. I believed that he had a daughter, and that she had sparkling blue eyes, and that she liked cats and pirates. I believed these things because -- well, because he told them to me. (Todd is not his real name, by the way.)

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The song I loved the most on that tape was "Didn't We Almost Have It All." Fourth song, first side. I would perform the song to the wall, then rewind it and perform it again. Play, rewind, repeat. I can still hear the squiggle of the tape in my head as I pressed on the jam-box button just long enough to find the song's opening once more. This is a lost art in the age of the iPod, but back then, knowing how many seconds to rewind a cassette was a sign you truly understood its rhythms. You had literally learned the music backward and forward.

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So weird. I'd just had it, like, 10 minutes ago, when I checked my voicemail at a friend's place. I started to call her to ask if it was lying around, which is when I realized: Not having an iPhone means you can't actually use your iPhone.

That night, even as rain pelted the windows, my home felt eerily silent. Like so many people, I do not have a separate landline, and I do not have cable TV. Without that small and all-powerful device within arm's reach, I was in exile. Typing emails on my laptop (because I still had wireless) seemed a bit like scribbling on parchment in the amber glow of an oil lantern. I would send the emails and receive nothing in response. Gah, is this thing even on???

The next morning, I walked out to the car to head to my friend's house when I discovered where my iPhone had been all night -- lying face-up on the driveway, inches from the driver-side door of my car, water still pooled on its black screen.

An iPhone suicide.

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"Ugh, cut it out," I said, because everyone knows: That helps.

Only weeks ago, we moved from a 200-square-foot studio in Manhattan to a roomy cottage in Dallas, which was a little bit like waking up one morning and discovering your black-and-white movie had gone Technicolor. This place is a find. It has two stories, a huge open kitchen, and windows that look out onto leafy, sun-dappled trees where birds flutter about. As far as I could tell, this is Cat Paradise.

And while I didn't exactly expect a Martha Stewart thank you card, my mood quickly soured when he didn't appreciate it. I'd already done so much for him: toys littered the floor, unused; a scratching post had become a tacky mail holder. Now, the cat stood at the front door, firm and ever-striving, demanding access to the one place I would not allow him to go.

"You're not going outside," I said.

Mrrrrow.

"The dogs next door will eat you," I said.

Mrrrooowww.

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I used to love to join them there. Whenever I'd come home to visit, I'd find the guys in that back booth, steady as a sundial. I'd order a Stella, or a Harp, something tart enough to sting but light enough to drink by the gallon. I'd drain it while they told their stories, and we shook off the frustration of the day, and became an easier, funnier version of ourselves. And every 15 minutes, a woman in a tank top and a casual ponytail would appear. "Can I get you another?" she'd ask, pointing to the empty glass.

It was the world's easiest question. The only question that might have been easier was, "Where should we meet?" because the answer was always: the bar.

And so I knew I was making everything more difficult, I knew I was disrupting the natural flow of the universe when I emailed Tim and said, "Actually, I quit drinking -- do you mind if we meet for lunch or coffee?"

It was such a simple request. Why did it feel like I was asking everyone to stop breathing for a while?

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It's a sign of just how magnetic Kinnaman's performance is -- and how great and unpredictable "The Killing" is -- that for at least two episodes, I actually thought Detective Holder was the perp. Between his temper flares and the sly evasions native to any former undercover narcotics cop, Holder seemed a likely candidate for Man Leading a Double Life. It turns out I was right on that last count-- recently, we discovered Holder is in the shaky first year of recovery from meth addiction. As his character evolves into someone more complicated and vulnerable, I feel comfortable nixing him from the suspects list. But there's a reason I keyed in to him so powerfully: He may not be the show's killer -- but he is likely its breakout star.

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I like to think I'm skeptical of email scams, but this one took me by surprise. As it turned out, so-and-so kind of owed me a movie ticket. I'd done her a favor earlier that month. So on that particular day, at that particular time, I didn't raise one eyebrow when I saw the email. I didn't sniff a fraud or send her a message to clarify. What I thought was: Good.

It had only recently struck me that email scams were getting craftier. After years of laugh-out-loud Nigerian hoaxes, chockablock with mangled grammar and outrageous pleas for the secret prince's survival -- hoaxes that only poor, good-hearted old people would ever fall for, at least according to the John Stossel report I watched -- it seemed that scams were becoming harder to suss out. After all, we were moving faster, with less concentration, through more mediums than ever before. The mea culpas from vague acquaintances -- "Sorry, everyone, please ignore that email" -- were becoming a regular fixture of my in box. When two whip-smart co-workers fell for a Facebook scam that promised to show you how you ranked among your friends, well, I knew that could have been me.

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The partnership is a natural fit: "The Story" offers fascinating first-person accounts on engaging, timely topics, much like Salon has since its inception. Though "The Story" has run pieces inspired by our Life section before, today marks the launch of our official alliance, as Marcelle Soviero, author of "Making peace at my ex-husband's Seder," offers a poignant account of interfaith marriage and life after divorce. Listen to Soviero tell her tale on "The Story" by clicking here.

Find when "The Story" is playing on your local public radio station here, or subscribe to the podcast.

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To try and untangle the influences that might lead one lone gunman to fire his Glock at a political rally, we turned to Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, respected psychiatrist and one of the foremost experts on paranoid schizophrenics. Torrey has written several books on the mental illness, including the bestselling classic "Surviving Schizophrenia." He is founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Virginia, a national nonprofit for the mentally ill.

Quite early in the news cycle, the media more or less diagnosed Jared Loughner as paranoid schizophrenic. Do you think that's accurate?

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