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This spring and summer, I watched with a curious admixture of horror and fascination as my face deteriorated into something new and strange, the process happening fast enough that it felt less like the physical manifestation of an illness, and more like a time-lapse video of a decomposing peach. It seemed to me that I was aging at warp speed, my already-pale skin drying out and turning white as bone, my cheeks inflating, my eyes darkening as if they had both been punched. If I had never been particularly beautiful, I had at least been reasonably symmetrical; now, I remember thinking on one especially startling morning in the mirror, I looked dead and badly-stuffed. All this played out the way Hemingway once described going bankrupt, which is to say: