I take my phone out of my pocket and start composing a text, struggling to keep my head up, my fingers moving slowly. “I’m OK,” I type. “Just need to be on my own.” I press “send,” and a message comes back immediately.

“I’m worried though.”

“I am OK,” I type again. And then I add, “Please don’t call anyone.”

“Will you let me in at least?” Ben replies. And I think about it again. I press my body against the door. His pulse throbbing, the valves in his heart opening and closing; I feel him swallowing as though I’ve been hit with the vibrations of the sound and can feel them physically in my stomach. I put my hand on the door handle. But then I take it off again. “Maybe later?” I text. “I just want to sleep.”

“OK,” Ben replies after a while, and I feel his presence leave, and then rise as it ascends the stairs. I hear the sound of his studio door closing two floors up. Then I tuck my phone away, and take a deep breath in.

I stay sitting by the door for a while. I look at my veins and wonder what is left of both sides of myself, now that there is barely any blood in my system, and my veins have been washed out by milk. I think back to the dreams I’d had last night while the milk had spread throughout my body: the two strange eels that seemed to depend on each other to stay alive, and then the dream of my mum. While I’ve spent so much of my life fixated on my dad, thinking of him as representing the living part of me, I’d forgotten that my mum is the one who is truly alive—no matter how she acts and what she says—and that my dad is the one who is actually dead.

I think I have known for a while that neither side of me can be separated from the other, and that this is true of my mum too; that I can’t punish the demon by making it eat only pig blood without punishing the human; I can’t listen to just one side, and block out the other; I can’t force one side to be dormant while I live a life pretending to only be the other side; I can’t starve either side out of myself. Really, I don’t even have “sides” at all. I’m two things that have become one thing that is neither demon nor human.