Warning: The following material may be considered triggering for some readers.
I still look for you in the shadows. And not just sometimes, but always. When I’m walking up the stairs to my apartment, alone in the dark, I squint into the distance and imagine your silhouette edged against the wall. Trying to blend in. And I wonder if the next time I squint if I were to see you running, would I be able to jam my key in the door and slam it before your hands are around me? And I don’t just think about this sometimes. I think about this always. Even when other people are there, my mind doesn’t just forget. Instead, it registers them as protection, another layer of safety between us, like a gun, but I would never carry a gun, so my mace rattles around in my purse unused even though I know it will be inefficient in the wind or in closed quarters.
Always a second before I even see the door, I prepare myself. I imagine it streaked with blood, or I picture you sitting there, and I don’t exhale until I see that it is bare save for the skeleton I stuck to it on Halloween and refuse to get rid of, and I don’t just think about this sometimes. I think about it always. And when I enter my apartment—keys safely making it in the door—I don’t just burst inside. I always pause, and I wait. If I look into the eyes of an animal waiting for me at the door, then I know I am safe, and I will lock the door. But if there is no one to greet me, I will be on edge. So I will leave the door unlocked, because that way it would be easier to escape if need be, and I won’t feel at ease until I can locate the animal and see that he is not hiding or frightened. I will look for any signs that you are here, but even sometimes I wonder if he wouldn’t hide because of you, because he knew you, and maybe he would remember and he, being as forgiving as I, wouldn’t be afraid. And when I don’t see him in the usual haunts, I imagine him strung up in my closet like in Straw Dogs, so I’ll flick the light on and hold my breath.
Even when I find him under the bed, I will not be convinced, so I will likely have to check the closets and the laundry area and even the place behind the water boiler (three times just to be sure) and the pantry. I used to even look under the sink, but I have graduated from that level of paranoia. I don’t even know if you can call it paranoia if it’s been true, but still, sometimes things get better. Even though I will think of you every step that I take alone in the dark and if it’s not you then it’s someone else, another possibility who could pluck me from the night and drag me into some kind of all-consuming obscurity.
The kind of stuff that most people don’t want to read about, except it’s the kind of stuff I devour. And people think it’s strange, they think it’s some kind of morbid fascination, but really what I am doing is preparing. I’m seeing where all of the other girls went wrong, because I know how easily I could have been them, and I’m fortifying myself so that it can’t happen to me. Never mind that I have to check the dark in my closet two, even three times sometimes before shutting the door, because I can’t wake up to its yawning darkness sprawled in front of me as I reach for the scissors that I sometimes keep underneath my pillow. Just in case.
This is the part nobody wants to tell you, because we believe in a cure-all. Take your prescription pills and talk it out and print out a checklist and make little marks everyday until you’re better and then you can graduate and move on. But that’s not how things are. Because at the end of act three, when the girl is saved, they don’t show you what happens after the credits. It cuts out on the happy reunion tears, so you don’t see what happens after when she hangs herself in her closet, when Norman Bowker doesn’t make it back from war. You don’t taste what it’s like to drive around and around and around in circles so desperate to penetrate the walls of that old life that is now and forever more inaccessible. Utterly, entirely inaccessible.
In real life you slide back and forth between acceptance and remembering, but that doesn’t mean it never will be okay. It just means you will always walk with a ghost, something echoing in your footsteps reminding you what almost was. What happened. What could still happen if you’re not careful.