There is a purple vein in the crook of my elbow. You can see it when my arm is in the light and also when it isn’t. It is the one the nurses stab when they put needles in me.

 
The carpet in my house is cream but has a lot of stains. Some are from blush, some from spaghetti sauce, most from cigarette ash. I live alone and I don’t care, so no one minds.

 
My love, where are you going? a character asks another on TV. I say, to the television, to the woods, dear fellow, where the light is! To the woods, to the woods!
No one answers me.

 
The doctors say I will get better but I tell them I don’t mind if I don’t. I am awfully tired of paying my electricity bill, it would be a relief to be free of it. They laugh. They laugh a lot when I say serious things.

 
The sex was always bad. But he was such a dear that it didn’t matter to me. He would stir my coffee for me in the mornings before he left and make the bed in the evenings when he came. He needed that and I let him.

 
Gorgonzola, I say to the man behind the cheese counter. He says they don’t have any and offers me some ricotta and I say that will do quite nicely. I am lactose intolerant but sometimes I just want to buy things that I have no use for. Don’t we all?

 
My mother was very disappointed that I never got married. Now that she is dead there is such a sense of relief every time anyone asks me if I am married and I say no. I don’t feel like I am letting her down anymore. I wish she had died much earlier. How much easier things would have been.

 
When the doctor told me I had cancer I told Daniel and he said he was very sorry but he would have to leave. I said it was okay and that I hoped he would have good sex with other women. Make their beds and stir their coffee. He smiled sadly and said he would miss me and then left. It was a sad, hot evening and I sat in front of the TV sweating, watching familiar characters make bad decisions.

 
Michael has been married for two years. Michael is my next-door neighbour. He tried to set me up with his friend Julian after Daniel left, but I told him I wasn’t interested because I knew from another conversation that Julian was a musician and I don’t understand people who enjoy sound.

 
I love bad soap operas. There is one called Wittekerke that is very bad and I love it because it makes me care about other people even if they are not real.

 
I have never understood the need for friendships. They are much more trouble than they are worth. Loneliness is the only kind of companionship I have ever needed. Even though it meant the sex stopped, I was glad when Daniel left. It was a strange glad, murky and slippery. I was also glad when I got ill. It felt like something very true, something that had been growing within me for decades, was finally free to assert itself.

 
I used to smoke, and I held cigarettes like they were part of my finger. It felt so natural. Now, I hold wood shavings in my dreams. To the woods, to the woods!

 
I like the seaside but I hate the sea and the sound of it. It rushes back and forth with a vivacity that makes me uncomfortable. I think Julian would love the sea.

 
You’re a Cancer, aren’t you? I ask the dog in the waiting room at the doctor’s surgery. He looks back at me blankly.

 
The loser has to get the drinks next time we go out, said the man to his friend, at the bar. I heard them because I was sitting next to them. I didn’t know what game they were playing, they had whispered back and forth about that. I found out three hours later, when I was in bed with the winner, that they had bet me. By which I mean, my body. My beautiful, cancerous body.

 
My bedspread is very feminine. It is pink with roses. I only have one and when I wash it, I sleep without bedding. On those days, the mattress feels like shiny plastic, like I am wrapped up for someone to buy.

 
Memories are the maggots that live in the recesses of our brains. They become juicy and plump when things happen and we say to ourselves: I’m going to remember this. That is what feeds these maggots, those words, and makes them squirm. And then time sedates them and they settle in the gaps between lobes and synaptic clefts and cranial nerves. And then someone or something stirs them and they jump up, remembered, sparking with life. But what happens when there are no more recesses, when our brains are stuffed with maggots and there is no more space? It has happened to me; I can barely remember anything anymore. The spaces are all taken up or instead, the maggots are dead.

 
I think it is a good idea that you don’t go to the party, I say to the goldfish in the dentist’s waiting room. He doesn’t answer me and I know I will see him at the soirée in my dreams.

 
Michael, my neighbour, tricked me. He said he wanted to meet me for coffee and when his friend Julian turned up Michael pretended it was a chance encounter. Michael asked him to join us but I turned the tables on them all. I told them I had to leave because I had to pick up my parents’ pig from the butcher’s shop and please, would they excuse me?

 
The cushion on my sofa is lily white with very small cherry blossoms. It reminds of ballet and also the first time I had sex, in the bathroom of a club, the music pounding, the friend of a friend pushing me up against the wall, the sink, the door. The image of it comes to me suddenly one morning when I see the cushion and I can feel his rough fingers on my inner thighs and shudder with nostalgic pleasure. I don’t even remember his name; I don’t think I knew it even back then.

 
I tell the television about my maggots/memories theory but it ignores me and the characters play on.

 
I met Daniel at an art club. He drew a naked version of himself and I painted my breasts and we decided that we really ought to have sex. Of course, he looked nothing like his portrait. Everything was much bigger than I expected and he used it like a paintbrush, in a slapdash manner that felt somehow both lazy and purposeful.

 
I think about the goldfish often. I wonder if memories are more like goldfish rather than maggots and they swim around in the juice in our brains and then, when they hit a nerve, that is when we remember.

 
The nurses are very competent. Needles in my skin feel like brushing my teeth and it’s nice that there are nurses who can do that. It is almost as useful as turning water to wine, probably even more so.

 
The ricotta sits in my refrigerator for weeks. It grows mould and the entire shelf smells funny, even after I throw it out and soak the shelf in dish soap.

 
I wanted to be a carpenter for a very long time. I like the feeling of wood beneath my hands and seeing curly wooden shavings roll into existence. I only shaved wood once, as a child with a friend and her father, but I was truly happy. I became a painter instead of a carpenter and I don’t know why.

 
Melanie, the nurse, says she is sorry about my diagnosis. I find this funny, I think, because I am not sorry at all. The truth of my body has asserted herself, that is all.

 
When I wanted to be a carpenter I also wanted to be a drunk. I did not have a father to tell me that the bottle ends. I had a mother who smiled when she drank and didn’t when she didn’t.

 
When the doctor says that it might be time to think about getting my affairs in order I tell him I have forgiven the goldfish and put the Cancerous dog in his place so everything is taken care of. He is confused, but not too much. He knows what I am like.

 
On the bus home from the hospital, tears fill my eyes and I say, I am breaking I am breaking I am breaking. I feel a deep ache in my stomach, an absence not an assertion for once; a longing for something, though I don’t know what. I get off and wonder if this is why people have friends. Friends would have tissues for my eyes and nose.

 
The only holiday I ever went on was when I was five. We went to the seaside and I stepped on a dead fish in the ocean. I hated the sound of the water even then. Isn’t it funny that fish can’t drown? I asked my mother. She said nothing, her pupils dilated and her breath sour.

 
Michael came by to apologise for inviting Julian, the musician, to coffee. I told him not to worry, that I would be dead soon. He said nothing.

 
I brush my teeth five times a day because it feels like the needles and I miss them. I sleep murmuring Julian, Daniel, Michael, Melanie. I wake up with a sore throat and happy that I am alone, that the absence in my gut is gone.

 
The twigs in my garden look like tiny, bare trees. That is what they are to ants and I think about that for a while. It is nice because I forget the need for wood shavings between my fingers.

 
I only want to eat burnt things. Burnt pie, burnt toast, burnt microwave meals, burnt wood. I love the taste of them when I watch TV.

 
I dream of the country and of worms that become wooden shavings. I wake up and sharpen pencils fervently, they are as close as I can get to the wooden curls I wish I were surrounded by, wooden tendrils I want to inhale and become.

 
Life goes on too long and we fill it with the belief that it is not long enough. Delusion is the thing that ties the human race together. Delusion and electricity bills. I wish it would all simply end and end quickly.

 
Here are some people like you, said my mother when she dropped me off to a summer camp where I was enrolled in ‘CLASSES FOR CREATIVE KIDS!’ so she could drink in peace.

 
The end is nigh! I say to the TV and then I say Melanie! Daniel! Julian! I shout all this through the wall I share with Michael, the names falling from my mouth like water rushing through a finally-broken dam. I am hurtling towards an end now and I can feel it, a rushing excitement in my veins and a potent relief similar to the kind I felt when I emerged from the bathroom of that club all those years ago.

 
There are pictures of children without homes and parents on the news and I sit there, rolling a pencil sharpening between my fingers, wondering if they know what electricity is, how happy they must be.

 
Be true to yourself and the world will be true to you, says my fortune cookie. I microwave the Chinese food until it burns and say (to the microwave), ah, delusion. The microwave is shrill and then silent.