Adoring speed Virginia had to watch herself.

She first encountered it in late high school: sweetened milky coffee and stolen cigarettes. She loved the buzz. She quick-addicted.

A year later, in college, she swallowed her first beans. Little white tabs of benzedrine that made her hum with energy. She felt like she could write an encyclopedia overnight.

She diversified into dexedrine and sometimes methedrine and finally, expensively, cocaine. She went from swallowing the pills at night, in study sessions with her friends (where she found she just couldn’t waste the buzz on schoolwork), to ingesting them in the morning, with ice-cold tomato juice and searing black coffee, to start herself spinning into a full full day.

Once she really went into it. She strung herself out for four days and nights, until she exhausted a big stash of bennies. She didn’t sleep and she rarely stopped moving. Her lower legs itched with a fishnet rash of poor circulation. She ate almost nothing. She produced reams of rushed writing and ragged speech. When she came down, she cried nonstop for 12 hours and then slept for 18. After that she moderated her consumption.

Cocaine arrived when she was almost done with college. Like royalty it seemed, appearing pure white on clean mirrors at parties, supplanting the cheaper raunchier stuff. Virginia never really “got” coke. She bought it, snorted it and rubbed her upper gums with it, and she acknowledged that it didn’t upset her stomach or mottle her legs. But it also never packed the buzz of good old bennies and dexies and meth. She eased away from coke before crack or crystal made the scene. She became a young adult. She drank coffee and smoked cigarettes.

She liked to live fast. Tame but fast. She was in her element in the office, smoking a Marlboro while juggling two telephone lines, checking some papers, and nodding her guidance to a hovering underling. She made a game of her walk from office to train station: deliberately lengthening her stride, slaloming among the slower pedestrians. She talked fast and argued faster, sometimes so into it that she quivered.

She raced through days, she savored days, and the days passed. In time, she couldn’t drink coffee as a bedtime beverage. As an after-dinner quaff. Any time after 2 PM. And still she sped. People sometimes made the “T = time-out” gesture at her, or floated a hand in the air before her, palm down and patting, as if to quell her.

She tried to modulate herself. She even wrote the word on the pullout shelf in her office desk, where at first she saw it whenever she used her phone. But as often as she let others talk or made herself be quiet during meetings, that often she grew bored, restless, impatient, and went from liking her job to watching the clock. After a few weeks, MODULATE prompted no reaction from her at all.

She married a relatively patient, plodding man, thinking he was silently strong and that he’d provide a model of calm for her. That only worked as long as she and Bill were experiencing debut domesticity nonstop: the first ten years of their marriage brimmed with new jobs, the fixer-upper house, the pregnancies and babies and must-have cars and appliances. Virginia kept working throughout all that (the office may have been the only thing that saved her sanity during the hormonal storm), but in the final three years of their marriage she faced their complete incompatibility. Bill lived at about one-tenth the velocity she did. He could easily fill his day with a trip to the store for dinner ingredients. She juggled the job and the kids and the nonprofit and also some exercise and painting, while contemplating graduate school. Shortly before she divorced him she concluded that Bill actually processed life so differently that he constituted an alien, compared to her. She decided that compatibility in life velocity was even more important to a relationship than agreement about humor or money.

Divorced at 40, with rights to half a house and joint custody of two kids, Virginia had to admit that marriage had enriched her. She looked around a little for a man more her speed, but she thought she might actually be slowing down, because around then the job and the children were just about all she could take.