Instagram what-I-eat-in-a-day posts are different from the YouTube equivalents. Most of the posts start with a picture of a white woman with an athletic, muscular body. They all feel like adverts for personal trainers. It gets boring quite quickly, so I search on YouTube instead, and find my way back to the Japanese girl I watched last time. I lose myself in my phone. Time becomes weird and immeasurable, as I watch days’ and weeks’ worth of meals being consumed in short videos; the sun rises and sets and rises and sets over and over again behind the various people I watch, and I begin to lose almost all sense of my surroundings. It’s like a high. I enjoy it. At the end of it, I find myself watching someone go through the steps for making rice and tuna pancakes, and memorizing them all carefully as though I’m going to make the pancakes myself; partway through, my phone dies.

I stay lying on my back with my eyes closed for a moment, and then roll across the room to the pig blood box. I lift my head with effort to look inside at the dark brown powder, and sigh, and then roll back across the room. The powder in that box feels like it represents so accurately what I am: a thing that is completely and utterly removed from human life, or even animal life; a thing that’s been sucked dry of everything that once sustained a real living body; something that is so devoid of life that it doesn’t even rot, but just sits in the corner of my studio out of the fridge, in its box, unchanging. The thought of consuming the powder revolts me; the thought of it going into my body, becoming a part of it, makes me feel like I myself am revolting.

I plug my phone in and wait for it to charge enough for me to open YouTube again, then I watch some videos that I find the strangest of all food videos online—eating disorder recovery vlogs, in which people film themselves struggling to eat fattening foods. I watch, in awe, as a woman maybe a bit older than I am places a Cadbury Flake between her lips and closes her eyes. Over the next minute or so, her jaw very slowly closes around the chocolate, and she takes a bite, looking like she is in pain. The woman’s skin is a strange yellowy gray, and her eyes pop out, and her mouth is bracketed on either side by wrinkles made not by age but by the body under her skin gradually disappearing. I wonder if perhaps there’s a demon in the woman, trying to starve the human, so it can take over the skin and skeleton and organs completely.