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Eliza attended the cocktail party because she’d been invited and this was long before she learned to say thank you, no. This was her first year in NYC, fresh out of school, with no diploma and no plan except to explore and travel. Follow the footsteps of the adventurers.

Contrary to her desires Eliza was in an upscale NYC home belonging to Etienne, a Swiss man. Eliza wore a borrowed dress, pink papery silk with a bow at the neck, this was her roommate’s. The magnanimity of others was her shelter from otherwise perpetual chaos but she would always be feral.

Etienne, the host whom Eliza recently met took the time to chat politely with her.

Inexplicably he blurted, ‘Appreciate your youth. You know nothing, yet, of the miseries of life.’

Eliza nodded appropriately but inwardly she seethed. His presumptuousness was abrasive. He knew nought of her, meanwhile he dispensed unsolicited opinion. Reckless, she thought, while she smiled benignly betraying nothing. Eliza was happiest on her way away from any formal affair. Taxis racing her home.

Eliza had much to learn in order to tolerate the weaknesses in others in the hopes they might return the favor. Eliza felt asphyxiated near such closed-minds, this mysterious collective myopia. She felt older than everyone she encountered, and she could not breathe.

Months sloughed and with that a deepening urge to escape. And periodically she would have enough saved to spring the coop, return the wild and pad around the planet until the money ran out.

Her pal Johnny offered a trip to the Hamptons. ‘I know you’d prefer the Amazon jungle!’ Johnny laughed at her and added this was a house of Etienne’s, that Swiss dude. Eliza kept quiet.

Etienne’s girlfriend was exquisite and a cocaine addict. Etienne wanted to marry her but not before, ‘Angel must clean up’, what would his family say!

An opportunity was before her, a limping gazelle. Fangs sprang naturally.

Eliza bought an ounce and expertly lured Angel away.