After the funeral I stopped eating. Everything I put in my mouth tasted bitter and poisonous. I'd force myself to have some soup and toast and it would just come back up a minute later. I wanted never to eat again in my life. To have to taste things. To enjoy food when she was lying down there in the ground being chewed up by worms.

Have you ever actually watched anyone eat? It's horrible. All the smushy strings of food dangling in between their teeth. The noises they make. The way their faces go when they take a bite that's too big. Grease and mess everywhere. Like sex. I used to feed my baby brother and he would spit up and then keep eating. Eating the stuff that he spit up. It used to make me feel so ill.

In college there was a girl. She was fat. She loved to eat so much. She would buy a burger every day after school and eat it sitting in her car. We were friends. She showed me how she used to "get rid" of it afterwards. After she'd eaten. It was awful. She'd kneel there with her head over the toilet and I used to wonder if it smelled, and if the smell helped her do it.

My boyfriend cooked for me once. A proper romantic meal with candles on the table and red wine. It was lovely. But then halfway through he got up and grabbed my hand and dragged me through to the bedroom and we started having sex. He was kissing me and I could just feel little bits of food still in his mouth, in his teeth. And I could hear his stomach: all these wet, farty noises his insides were making.

Towards the end she couldn't eat much solid. She was on a drip. The tube went into her arm but it looked like it was coming out of her. Like they'd reached inside and pulled out this plastic vein, this thing. And the stuff they fed her was yellow, like piss. She had a — what do you call it — a colostomy bag. Just hanging there beside her bed where anyone could see it. I used to think the stuff coming out of her looked more like food than the stuff going in.

When she died I was out in the hall. I had been there for two days straight, because they thought she could go any minute. I went out to go to the toilet, and on the way back I bought a chocolate bar from the vending machine. I was eating it. I walked back to her bed and there was a nurse there. The chocolate was sweet and sticky in my mouth and I couldn't speak through it. I was still holding half the bar in my hand, melting it.

Sometimes now I get this feeling, right here in my chest. It's like I wish I could be sick. You know when you know you're going to be sick, but it's a long time coming? You just wish it would come and be over with. I can imagine what it would be like: all this black, lumpy slurry rushing out of me, pouring out of me. And afterwards I would feel so clean. There'd be nothing left inside me. No food or shit or sick or piss. I'd be clean.