I am watching Yellowjackets with Anna Shea, Laura, and Jeff. “If we’re ever in a plane crash and I’m already dead, please eat my body,” I say. “I don’t want you to starve.”

I am glad to be here in their apartment, which is bright and breezy, full of good food and bright colors and laughter. When I left home, there was a dead mouse in the crawlspace, or at least it smelled like one. Tidying up for spring, I have found their bodies in the yard. In early fall, there was one under my sink, then there was a second, spewing tidy turd pellets in fear. I killed them both, then hired a man to set bait stations outside. Stop them before they get inside, was the logic, but there was a gap in the crawlspace wall we both overlooked.

“The foley artists had a long conversation about what sound the first body part would make,” Anna Shea tells me before we start watching. I immediately try to guess what it will be, suddenly conscious of the parts of me that would make good eating. The lean flesh of my forearm. I imagine the imprint of teeth.

Yellowjackets is more intense than I assumed it would be, internalized misogyny and the way I have seen it pitched online rendering the show toothless sight unseen. I immediately love it and place it in a pantheon beside other thematically-linked shows. Hannibal cooked his victims into beautiful delicacies. The men of The Terror ripped into raw flesh. While I’m watching Yellowjackets, I text my writing partner Molly the magic words, “gay cannibals.” Take the object of your desire fully into your mouth, because how can you not desire the thing that will keep you alive.

When I was seventeen, in senior year of high school, I stopped eating lunch. This wasn’t an eating disorder, I reasoned, because eating disorders terrified me: the way the girls around me shrank, the way their shrinking uncovered cores of unquenchable rage. Everyone within the blast radius was implicated. If I, too, skipped lunch, I thought without thinking, I didn’t have to be as afraid of them. Their rage would become less terrifying in its strangeness, more legible. I could get through the day, and so could they, and I could eat at home, and so could they. It was the same magical thinking that banished strange shapes in the closet, at the bottom of the bed. If I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me.

In Yellowjackets, when cold comes, the girls’ hair grows matted and the dirt coats them like protection. Caught in a Canadian winter, I too might start to slip the tether. These days, I only really feel connected to my body when I’m sweating. Sweating tangy sunscreen on a summer walk, I anticipate the cold bath waiting for me at home, the way I will slough off all this excess and return to a crisper version of myself. Then, clean, I will sweat again on a patio, my wrist pressed to a glass of iced tea. Then, between sheets, with the cicadas humming outside my window, I’ll let the all-over sweat build and cool when I finish touching myself.

Some people get tattoos. Pain doesn’t ground me, particularly. It just hurts. “How are your periods?” my dentist asked, surveying the mess my grinding teeth left behind. He felt gently along my jaw, pressing, his body likewise pressing against my right arm. “You must have a high pain tolerance.” The oral splint he sold me to ease my jaw back into position cost over five hundred dollars without insurance. I have insurance, but neither dental nor health want to deal with this kind of thing, the way one day it began to feel inevitable that my jaw would stick wide open.

“Was there a trauma?” my dentist also asked me, during our first or second conversation about my jaw. “No,” I said, thinking, car accident. Thinking, punched in the face. Later, driving home, I wondered whether I should have told him about—

How to this day I struggle to explain exactly what happened in my mid-twenties. How part of it doesn’t belong to me, but part of it does, and that’s the part without words. I feel compelled to arrange my feelings neatly, in defense and in testimony, but every time I do they stare back at me across the cold hut where the past is stored. So, you’ve never had sex, says the dead body of the person I was when it all began, and they accidentally made you feel bad for it. Big deal.

But it was more than that.

So, they talked over you, my frozen corpse continues. They made you feel invisible.

But it was more than that.

What the fuck ever. That’s no reason to lose your shit.

I felt connected to my body then, too. It was the thing that churned, tingled, hummed, froze, wheezed, went numb, couldn’t breathe, got smaller, developed visible hipbones, drove when it shouldn’t have for the first time in its selfish little life. Nothing really bad happened. Everyone survived.

The girls in Yellowjackets become the women in Yellowjackets, and they don’t want us to know what they did in the woods. But, still, their eyes glow. They slit the bellies of rabbits.

I have slipped my fingers into my own warmth and thought that this feeling must have been made to be shared, but the moment anyone sees me as an object of desire, I feel like prey. It’s a frozen, gasping, cold water feeling.

Part of what happened, during those years I struggle to diagram, is that once, at a bar, seated beneath a taxidermy moose head, a friend asked me whether I’d ever had an orgasm. She asked me this in public, in an offhand way that was both joke and not, both casual and nothing of the kind. It was a question in search of an answer that would explain something about me. “Of course,” I said, or “Obviously,” I said. I said some barely remembered thing and laughed. I actively waited to be anywhere else.

But, alone in my room, I can lower the lights and look in my mirror and feel safely desirable. I can impulsively create a dating profile before letting it fester for months because I still don’t know how to say what I feel, and direct questions deserve direct answers.

“You don’t owe anyone any part of your story,” says Katie, who is paid by the hour and will soon go on maternity leave, but what’s the alternative? My worth lies in how pleasurable it is to pursue me, or my worth lies in how compellingly I can write down my life, justify my existence. I know that both of these thoughts are bear traps set for myself, but knowing this doesn’t change the fact that I am already impaled on spikes at the bottom.

Home from watching Yellowjackets, the smell of death has finally left my house, but I am still nervous. What if another mouse crawls inside to die before the people come to patch the hole? Before I left, I climbed down into the crawlspace to try and find the body, but it was pitch black, and I couldn’t aim my flashlight and crawl at the same time. I didn’t want to find it with my hands first. I didn’t want to find it at all.

The man I hired to set bait stations drops by. He refills and rearranges them, then knocks on my door to settle up. On the porch, he shows me pictures of the fish his buddy caught. “I never take pictures of my catch,” he says. “I don’t like to show off.”

“Good thinking,” I say. “That way it could be a shark. It could be anything.”

I fish only infrequently, only ever when my family visits a cabin in the woods of northern Colorado. I am unsentimental about the way they flop in the bucket once I bring them to shore and my dad has wrenched the hook out of their jaw using needle-nosed pliers. The fish, when we prepare them for eating, are sliced along the belly and cleaned out down to the spine. Later, after they’ve been stuffed with flavor, wrapped in foil, and cooked, we eat them slowly, peeling flesh from bone, careful not to choke on their tiny, slicing ribs.

Once, one fresh morning on the still lake, the rainbow trout I found wriggling at the end of my line was large, with iridescent pink fins. It slapped an arc of droplets into the air as it left the water. It seemed to be staring me down.

“It’s so beautiful,” I said, and for a moment I wanted to throw it back, something we only do for small fish, or suckers. It held no magic properties, but I felt snared by it, like the French bulldog I met on the threshold of a party in one of my lowest moments. It soothed my heart by just existing.

There’s lingerie in a bag in my closet no one will ever see. I bought the lingerie because I thought, one day, I could use it to become a different person. I imagined myself stoking another person’s desire until it became large enough to engulf the room, large enough to hide in.

Instead, I put my body in it, arrange my body in it, and take pictures of myself and the photos don’t look any better or worse than the photos I take in broad daylight, but they are secret, and they are mine, and the self who exists in the photos and belongs only to me is as real as the self who belongs to the world. She is a mystery and she is unfolding, but she is real and she is hungry for herself.

And, oh, for a split second I thought to myself, this fish is too beautiful to die.