Poetess.

I come back to you every time, and it is no longer a shock.

To get anywhere, you have to start your journey - but my journeys are always circular, and they all terminate with you.

For ten years or more, a third of a lifetime, you have been my reference point. You gave birth to the twin ideas, both of them corrosive, that it is possible to become sufficiently depleted that the only option remaining is to take your own life; and that no great experiences are required to produce writing of huge significance.

Worse still, the logical conclusion of the two concepts above is that a writer is elevated to immortality upon an untimely or inexplicable death.

I was supposed to be dead eight months ago, according to the timetable I made when you first broke my skin and took residence there: the great weight which I drag with me everywhere. Had I been more brave, the thin gruel of my own words would have sold maybe a hundred copies by now. The shifting, celebrity-obsessed western society would have made sure that I had my five minutes, and then cast me aside in open-mouthed anticipation of its next victim.

At thirty I intended to die; to fill the oven with my oversized head and replicate your end. I wished to rise so that we might compare notes - you, whose tree overhangs with serious, difficult fruit - and the butcher could have made off with my sarcophagus.

Now you are not a harbinger of death but instead postpone it. In times of crisis I listen to you read your slow, devastating poetry, and I swear it is a form of medicine. I am not replenished by you; no - you complete the process of hollowing-out, that I might begin again.

The bare bones are yours, oh butcher, but the virgin residue which will re-commence filling them out any minute now is my future. That my new, fragile skin is made from your own laboratory-synthesised genetic material is a secret neither of us have to share.