Dear Hanna

by Zoje Stage

Anyway, the Other presence inside me . . . it both isn’t me and is me. She is someone I don’t understand at all, and someone I have everything in common with. I love her more than anything and I despise her for being

such a wicked little monster. She keeps me company and she makes me feel alone. She isn’t an “alternate” personality but her own separate being . . . who happens to live inside me. I am her house. She is the inhabitant of my body, the house.

She was never going to be fundamentally different from who she’d been at seven, when she’d tried to kill her mother.