Tabitha Carvan - This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It

What are you thinking about? I am thinking about Benedict Cumberbatch. Even right now (cheekbones), writing this (green-blue-gray eyes), I am (tight-trousered thighs) thinking about (mouth) Benedict Cumberbatch.

I am writing this between thoughts of Benedict Cumberbatch, and I am writing this under photos of Benedict Cumberbatch, including that Vanity Fair cover where he has one arm behind his head and the other tugging at the waistband of his trousers. It is the most horizontal that a man could look in a vertical portrait. The photographer, my stand-in, is surely straddling him.

I am writing this from inside Benedict Cumberbatch. His face on a hoodie my husband ordered from the internet for my Christmas present, and which I put on every morning as I tiptoe out of the bedroom to come here. Do you know how many Benedict Cumberbatch hoodies there are on the internet? my husband asked me, eyebrow raised, after I unwrapped it. Yes, I do: 3,803.

Thats a lot of people inside Benedict Cumberbatch. What are we all doing in there? What am I doing in the spare room, lit only by the laptops false dawn, while my family sleeps? Why am I, a wife and mother, creeping off in the dark to think about celebrity thighs? Why am I, a grown woman, sticking up pictures of a heartthrob on my wall? Not even in nice frames, but torn out of magazines and stuck on with Blu Tack! It will ruin the paint with greasy stains, like the connect-the-dots pattern I left behind on the walls of my teenage bedroom. Why do I use my precious scraps of free time to watch GIFs animate on a loop, like theyre not actually a slightly moving image but a full-length feature movie? A really amazing movie, because I reach the climax every two seconds; that same moment, over and over again, when a man I dont know takes off his scarf. Five stars. Would do again. And again. And again so many more times that I forget to take the bread out of the freezer for school lunches. Later, as I manhandle the contorted icy wads into lunchboxes, Ill tell the kids Im sure it will be fine by lunchtime.

Will it be fine? Not the sandwiches (no, they definitely wont), but all of it. Me. Will I be fine? I seem to be on the verge of something not right. Whatever this is, it isnt me. Soon Ill look straight at the camera and say, What have I become? Ill snap out of it. Ill grow up. Ill get to work repainting my walls. Ill say, Remember the time I was totally obsessed with Benedict Cumberbatch? What was the deal with that? and everyone will laugh and then I will make the school lunches properly this time.

But my story doesnt seem to be ending this way. Instead of coming to my senses, I come back to the spare room, the photos, the GIFs, the cheekbones. This is very bad news, because I know the only other way the story can end: I embarrass myself. And I am. Im embarrassing myself, and Im probably embarrassing you too, with my words like trousers and horizontal. Benedict Cumberbatch himself will be embarrassed, not to mention what-does-your-husband-think-about-all-this.

Its true this doesnt feel like me. Not the me I thought I knew, anyway.

I have never felt so good.