You know how your life can develop a background hum, like a sound that you might hear coming from a fridge or a fan when everything else in the house has fallen still at night? A nagging feeling at the back of your mind that tells you that you have done something foolish which is going to make itself known sooner rather than later but you’re going to carry on pretending you haven’t? That there’s something about to fuck up in the future because you haven’t dealt with it? A debt that you didn’t pay, which has been multiplying all through your finances, silently. An infidelity that is going to catch up with you. A body that you buried in a shallow grave. Well, it was a Saturday night in Los Angeles and my background hum was getting louder. My whole body was waiting for blood to trickle down my thighs, and it still hadn’t come. I was waiting for signs of no life. That’s what waiting for a period is – waiting for a little death: a petite mort of the silent kind.