The erasure of the ant’s self while his body continued to be animated was as unnerving as Isabelle Adjani flailing about the Paris metro in Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film Possession — which we watched together a couple of nights later. Adjani carried a bag of groceries and wore an absolutely fabulous high-collared indigo dress that buttoned down the back. As she ascended an escalator from the metro platform she was wide-eyed and began to laugh. It was the uncontrollable laugh of possession — too long, too effusive, and seemingly prompted by nothing. She emerged into a deserted, fluorescent-lit tunnel. Everything was bathed in blue. There was no soundtrack, just the sound of her moist footsteps and her echoey, guttural laughter. Her gait became unsteady and she tumbled against the tunnel’s tiled wall, sliding along it as her laughter transformed into hysterical crying. And then, as if her true self was momentarily emerging from the possession, she screamed. She screamed as she was pulled along by some unseen, internal force and flailed in resistance to it — or perhaps because of it. In her flailing her grocery bag smashed against the wall in a cascade of milk and egg yolk. The sight of that white-and-yellow profusion pierced me. It was the same bag of groceries you dropped when rescuing me from the Datsun in the driveway, your body in the grips of a different possession.

By grade ten, Ana had become the Patti Smith to my Robert Mapplethorpe, and what we lacked in punk bravado we more than made up for in punk hygiene. After a childhood spent tamping down her wild mane of black hair, Ana was learning to rock it to startling Riot Grrrl effect. She was once sent home after refusing to cover up or take off her homemade T-shirt bejewelled with the words Immanuel My Kant. At fifteen she was already drinking black coffee out of a large thermos, which I found mildly intimidating for some reason. Scrawny, gaunt, and with poor posture, I mostly looked like a bad Egon Schiele sketch. But next to Ana I felt invincible. It was at a party at her house (in her bed, in fact) that I drunkenly kissed a boy for the first time. And I lay in her basement in a yellow sleeping bag a few feet from her when she also kissed a boy for the first time (hers decidedly hotter). I remember the sound of the basement furnace turning on, and thanking its dull roar for drowning out the sounds of furtive smacking.