Here, where the world is quiet, Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds and spent waves riot In doubtful dreams of dreams;

I watch the green field growing For reaping folk and sowing, For harvest-time and mowing, A sleepy world of streams.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne

Today, as I fly out of LAX, probably for the last time, the souvenirs I'm taking with me are two truths I gleaned doing hair in the Hollywood movie industry: 1) appearance is everything; and 2) reality, that eternal shape-shifter, is the biggest illusion of all.

Reality is 99.9 percent perception. It morphs into whatever form best moves ahead the perceiver.

As I, Avril Carson, thirty-five-year-old widow of Chet, and former aspiring-starlet-turned-Hollywood-stylist, wipe my clammy palms on my Dolce & Gabbanas—which I bought gently worn at a consignment shop for a fraction of the retail price…but no one needs to know that—and prepare to speed into the wild blue yonder into the next chapter of my life, witness Hollywood truths one and two play out in real life.

It goes like this: Even though I loathe flying, I've convinced myself that I must fly across country because the alternative is to come rolling back home into Sago Beach, Florida, in a Greyhound bus.

No can do. Ride the bus, that is.

Not when these jeans retail for nearly three times the cost of a bus ticket.

Not when I'd have to travel twenty-seven hundred miles, stopping at forty-one different stations along the way, to arrive at 3:42 in the morning. Call me vain, but I refuse to go two days, sixteen hours and fifteen minutes without a shower. It makes my skin crawl just thi