I stare at the catastrophe of my young face, at my emptiness. Thousands of years appear to hang on me. I feel that I am waking, slowly and sluggishly, from a profound and disturbing sleep to find that the nightmare is real after all. This is it. My world has contracted to this, to planning my next stolen meal, to examining myself in the mirror. My life is a dirty beetle, repulsed into a ball. There will never be a time when I’m the right shape. I will never be lean enough. This is the future. This is all I am, another dirty creature. I can almost see the tapeworm wriggling under my skin.