Haunted

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It isn’t all progress. It isn’t all new revelations and tidy endings. That’s what I write most about because I know a good story, even a true one, has an ending, or at least an arrow pointing to it. There are parts of my recovery that feel complete, that are only lacking the right string of words so that I can leave a trail of brightly colored yarn behind me. There are other pieces, though, buried and decaying versions of myself, that seem to be following not far behind me, waiting for me to slow, just a bit, so they might wipe me off the path entirely.

Sometimes, when I wake up from half-remembered nightmares too afraid of my own mind to go back to sleep, I think about the first time I self-injured and the child self I drowned that night, holding my bleeding thumbs under the water while ribbons of blood unfurled around me. If I have demons, if I live with the ghosts of childhood past, he is one of them and that is the moment he died, scared, bloody, and holding his breath. When it’s late, when the apartment is dark and shadows fall strange through half pulled curtains, and twitch in the flickering streetlights, I admit I hide from him. I shut the doors so I can’t see the bathtub from my bedroom, can’t see his bleeding hand smack determined against the sides, clawing for a freedom I have not yet given him. He is angry, and he should be. He’s been abandoned by everyone who should have loved him, including me. He fought hard against the dawn of self-inflicted pain to cope with the pain beyond his control and he lost his life to that struggle, leaving a gaping maw in my psyche that I filled with blood over and over, not aware or not caring that it would only leak out again by morning. That doesn’t mean he’s gone, though, and it doesn’t mean that he’s not fighting still, not realizing that the war is over, that he no longer has to fear what I might do to him if left alone with my heartache and a sharp object. I am afraid to face him and so I shut the door, only leaving my bedroom when the lights are on and I can see clearly that I’m safe from his touch, his pruney fingers, his demand that I tell him why I’ve done this.

Sometimes, I think about the cruel self I was and the way I caged him in with false smiles and pleasantries. I think about the injustices he longed to lash out at, the manipulation he watched me tolerate, and know he must have been seething, must be seething still as I try to channel his bark but not his bite. I can feel him standing beside me when I say yes when I want to say no, when I overexplain, when I sit in silence and listen while people drop all their hurt at my feet. I know that his mouth is hanging open in a scream I cannot hear. There have been times I felt convinced that if I only turned around, I would see him there, standing over me, mouth agape with an expression of rage, veins standing out on his neck and forehead, fists clenched, cold air escaping his mouth. I did not turn around and haven’t still. Instead, I braced myself against walls, hoping to squash him out of existence. Even now I sit with my back to the corner in every space I enter so I can never glimpse him by accident. If I have demons, if something in the dark is out to get me, it’s him and he’s right to be angry that I smiled while imprisoning his desperation to keep me safe from my own appeasing nature, tolerating indefinitely what he happily would have destroyed. He wants to protect me still, but I don’t know how to turn and face him, to hear his screams, to direct him toward the people too accustomed to wiping their feet on my back, and so I don’t look at him, hoping that if I ignore his presence his scream won’t become my own.

I think about the smiler, too, the one who grins, lips tight, revealing his gums, at everything he fears, which is most things. He is tense in every muscle, every joint, straining to disguise or else evade any hint that what he says, the way he behaves, is a crude mask thrown over a howling pain trapped in his chest. He skitters around corners, more afraid of me than I am of him, hair greasy and dangling, clothes several days unchanged, fresh cuts dripping on his forearm, smile frozen painfully on his face. He looks terrified every time I see him, usually late at night, trying to hide his food wrappers in the bottom of the trash, not realizing there’s no one left in our life who would be angry at his survival. His face is one of stunned laughter, like he’s so horrified by whatever he’s just seen that he’s become hysterical. No matter which direction he’s moving, he faces me, head turned at impossible angles, neck twisting like someone hung or else strangled. When I reach for him, he flinches away from my touch, afraid that my compassion may be rage instead. I know why he feels that way. I remember the moments I desperately needed to be held and was punished instead. I remember all the times my emotions were met with rage. He is afraid of me. He is afraid of everyone. He is the sound in the walls, the scratching late at night, a tight forced laugh just before my alarm goes off. He jumps into my skin when I’m not looking, possessing me at the exact moment that I feel talked over, misunderstood, my words muffled under layers of context that no one wants to hear. Afterwards, when the argument has ended and the conversation has moved on, every part of me aches and I curl inwards, protecting the hurt inside of me that I cannot allow to be seen.

If I am haunted, if there’s something to fear in the late night hours when the shadows twitch on the walls and a blanket feels like poor protection from demons that sit waiting in bathtubs, behind me, and just out of my line of sight, they aren’t other people. They aren’t entities to be banished or ghosts to be prayed over. They’re simply parts of myself lost somewhere in the fray of healing, yet to be pulled into the light and warmed with comfort and understanding. If I am haunted, and I believe that I am, I have done it to myself.

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