ESMarts

It started from the very first night we stayed. My mom’s room was situated in the open kitchen area so no more 3 am snacks for my restless nights. I had the upstairs. A bedroom connected to another via a bathroom. I decided if I couldn’t sleep then maybe a shower might do me some good. Better than lying. I noticed immediately that I felt something watching me. I couldn’t place it anywhere but everywhere. I have a history of nervous behavior so I tried to write it off that night by taking a shower anyway. Rushing through it as if when I closed my eyes under the water something moved closer each time. It didn’t feel negative necessarily. It felt curious. I didn’t sleep that night & suffered immensely in my classes the next day. Blamed it on the new move & tried my best to push it away.

Stuff kept happening after that. Stuff that you could keep blaming on your own misinterpretation. Swearing you locked the door but when you get home it’s wide open. Lights on when you thought you turned them off. Stuff like this kept happening again & again. I started sleeping in my mom’s bed whenever she’d let me & on the couch when she didn’t. Something about the upstairs, especially at night, would make me feel awful. I would get physically ill if I stayed upstairs for too long. It felt as if I stepped onto a water bed every time I’d pass the third step from the top. I tried telling my mom but she wrote it off as my nervous disposition again & again.

There were nights where my mom had to call friends, family members, & even the cops because I would swear someone was standing by the pool watching me through my window. It started knocking on the outside of the house, moving wicker furniture on our porch. Sometimes into a circle, sometimes hanging up all the furniture on the porch rails. Most of the time this would happen when I was home alone but it also started to wake up my mom up in the dead of night with this. Time & time again people would walk the property with flashlights. They’d check in every hole & holler near by. Broke open old sheds on the property the landlord didn’t even know the purpose of. Nothing.

It seemed to back off for the first week of summer. Something about the sun & lighting bugs kept it at bay. I actually got to sleep without dreams or my tv turning on full volume to wake me. My string lights didn’t flicker. I thought maybe it’d left. I let my guard down. I started having friends over again instead of begging to stay over at their houses. I was playing detectives with my friend outside. We had found an old can around a tiny fire that’d been snuffed out long ago with some rotting cigarette butts. As kids do, we started making up a story about how the killer must sit here in wait watching the house move until it doesn’t anymore. Before I even knew what was happening, I saw the color drain from my friend’s face. A face usually filled with expression & life went dead pale in a split second. She was staring into the trees so I met her focus. A huge pillar of what seemed like coal smoke started forming in the air. I couldn’t breathe, my eyes burned but I couldn’t blink. I watched as this thing stepped onto the ground & we both heard its step connect with the crunch of dead leaves & grass. Something, call it survival instincts or just outright fear, yanked me to my feet. I grabbed her by the arm & started running through the brambles. In my mind, it knew the trail too well but not the woods. We ran for what seemed like hours but I know in reality was only a few minutes, not even a mile. We made it inside my house & pushed a couch in front of the door as some sort of protection against whatever we had just seen. Neither of us spoke. We just cried. For hours & hours we cried until my mom had come home from work to find us curled up underneath her bed passed out from exhaustion & the couch still pushed up against the front door. We never talked about what happened. I don’t know what she saw that day but I know what I felt more than what I saw. I often wonder what she felt then.

I stopped having friends come over after that. I was terrified something bad was going to happen. I did everything I could to not stay at my own house. Even if that meant being somewhere else in my mind. I blared music constantly. Trying to do something, anything to claim my own space there. I was young & inexperienced. I didn’t have an elder at this time teaching me how to handle this sort. It kept escalating. There was a fur-real horse we had to take the batteries out of but would still neigh at random times throughout the day. The bathroom sink would cut off & on. My books would have pages ripped out, strewn all over my room. I even found my copy of Alice in wonderland on the roof of the nearest shed to the house. I was barely getting by. Eating was difficult, school was difficult, everything felt as if it took 10,000x more effort to think about let alone do. I started thinking about killing myself. Not in the way of ideation but in the intrusive thoughts kind of way. My grades slipped & so did I but it seemed as if people cared more about one than the other. It all culminated in late 2013 one early cold morning before school.

I hate waking up. That’s still something I struggle with as an adult. It takes me a little while to “get back into my body” as I like to say. Waking up feels like I just did a trip around the world & i’m putting back on my regular clothes (aka my body). I have a regular-ish routine when I wake up now. Then it was hell. I would wake up (again) & have already put on my clothes for school around 4:30am because I couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time. I’d go brush my teeth & pee all while avoiding looking into the bathroom mirror because I knew if I did I would see something I didn’t want to. This morning was particularly hard. I felt like I weighed a ton. Moving my body hurt. I thought maybe I was sick but got my bag & headed for the stairs anyway. I stepped down & as I stepped on the third step from the top it was as if the stairs disappeared from underneath me. In a split second I was at the bottom of the staircase. I remember both of my arms screaming red with pain & my blood all over the bottom steps. I let out a screen rattling wail & my mother, who was outside getting the car warm came inside to find me crumpled in a pile of myself on the floor. At first she was convinced I had done something to myself. That was until she lifted my shirt at my mention of my back being on fire & seen the forming of a black, green, & blue bruise bigger than her hand by twice its size in the shape of a hand print. I had finger print bruises in my back for three months. I moved out immediately after getting done with my x-rays at the emergency room. My arms weren’t broken thankfully. Just really banged up. I refused to go inside again even just to get my things. My mom moved out a year or so after this.