I’d barely paid attention to girls before. I remember this was a conscious choice; I was always very self-conscious. One of my mother’s favourite memories was the one of the nosy neighbour next door asking me: ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ I was three. I was playing with wooden cubes in the sandbox at the back of the garden. Without lifting my head, I responded, ‘I am busy.’ My mother liked to recall this memory as a sort of cautionary tale and brought it up often during my teens. So for a long time, since girls weren’t spontaneously paying attention to me, and I was equally unwilling to go after them, I really did believe that I was destined to save myself for better things. Until the sleep paralysis started. At least, I think that’s what it was. It made me feel restless. It was puberty, but it wasn’t just that. It felt like a very specific need. A need I didn’t have a name for, but which was a very strong one for sure.

The experience renewed itself each time, never losing its intensity. I jolted up from the blackout that returned me to myself after the paralysis, sitting stiffly in bed, my body throbbing with its own blood. I put myself under the steaming jet of the shower, scalding water lashing me across the back in wide red strokes. I knew with complete clarity what it was that I needed: I needed to push myself immediately into or through another being, crash into another body. It was a kind of hunger and I was so, so hungry. I was hungry for breaking into something, yes, but it was the act of breaking that mattered most. I needed to snap back into my own shape after my horror. I thought about this while I touched myself in the scorching hot water, punishing myself for my impure thoughts, though technically also indulging them.

At fifteen I no longer observed my mother’s constellation of sins, but I still figured that wanting to hurt someone was a fucked-up thing to want, regardless of one’s religious inclinations. I was too naive then, of course, to imagine that some people may wilfully seek to be hurt as a means to achieve pleasure. I thought that hurting would, well, hurt, and who wants that? So I crushed my urges, my chest pressed against the shower tiles, just in case my mother opened the door while I was in there.

Afterwards, I spent a long time cleaning myself.