I’m a person.
Well, of course I am.
A silly thing to say, isn’t it?
I’m the one writing this and I’ll be the one to post it.
Rest assured that the first sentence is more of a reminder for myself than for you, dear reader.
You see, I’m a person.
I’ve been born, I’ve been raised, I’ve struggled with homework, gotten annoyed when someone didn’t order fast enough in line, etc.
Normal things, by all means.
But despite all of this, I sometimes feel as though it’s not these mundane, or even happy moments, that define me as a person, but just the bad.
Moments where I feel as though I am only defined by the men I’ve come across in my life.
Men who I gave my trust to, but who always shattered it in the end.
I once read about someone named Dean Allen Cole.
A prolific serial killer he was, and one who’d torture his victims by first inserting a glass rod into their urethra and then shattering said glass rod while it was still inside them.
I find that to be a pretty good analogy for what these men have done to me. I allowed each of them to insert a glass rod in me, trusting them not to break it, but they all did.
They all broke that rod, shattering it into fine grains of sand.
But the way each of them did this differed wildly.
It made it that much harder for me to see the signs.
I am a person.
I’ve paid my taxes.
I’ve been on disaster dates.
I’ve gone to the movies and so on and so forth.
But only until recently did I start to be supported by these memories instead of the three glass rods I’ve had to heal from.
This will be a story about three men.
Each of whom I allowed to place a glass rod in me.
And each of whom shattered it without a second thought.
…
Let’s start with my father.
Of course.
Doesn’t it always start with the father?
The first man you meet in your life.
Around ten minutes have passed since I wrote the previous sentence.
I just had to take a moment and look outside my window.
It’s morning now.
I couldn’t sleep, and I thought to hell with it.
I’ll just write this story.
That’s probably why the first part sounds so disjointed. I’m not going to change it, but I hope that you can look past it, for the sake of this story.
Anyhow, I’m now wondering where I should start.
Just writing what comes to mind.
My dad never hit me, if you’re wondering.
That’s just too easy.
It’s always about the hitters and the beaters.
The rapists even.
Those who leave marks that can’t be washed away.
Those that can be documented and understood by those who have not personally gone through it.
Hardly anyone ever talks about the unseen.
The hidden.
What can be washed, covered, and lost.
My dad did give me pancakes, and anything I asked for, and I always gave him hugs.
But sometimes he’d want an extra tight hug or a sloppy and long kiss on the cheek, and these were the moments where I would become uncomfortable and push him away.
I never knew he’d put the glass rod in until these moments, when he’d push it further or twist it.
He’d do so by becoming grumpy and distant, giving me the cold shoulder or acting offended.
And then things would go back to normal, only for this to happen again after a while.
After how long?
It depended.
But I would be reminded of the rod’s existence more and more often the older I got, to the point where I just couldn’t forget about it before the next time.
I became consumed by it.
Fearful of when it would move again.
Fearful of when it would shatter.
I became a bit of a wreck, and I’m still wondering if that’s putting it mildly.
I was afraid to rebel, to do the things that my father didn’t like.
I didn’t have my mother to comfort me.
My parents had been divorced ever since I could remember, and maybe that’s why I let things go on for as long as I did.
I blamed the divorce on his overly attached behavior.
But I feel like whether or not that’s the reason behind his actions is irrelevant.
By the time I was in high school, the glass rod was all I thought about.
I say “glass rod” now, but I didn’t think of it like that back then.
I had yet to read about Dean Allen Cole.
Back then it was more like a balloon.
A metaphor that perfectly represented my innocence.
His kisses on my cheek felt like nasty and dirty stains, and his hugs made me feel like I was wading through sewage. I only thought about the rod breaking, the balloon bursting.
And it did.
It finally did.
I just wished it had done so sooner.
I used to blame myself for not popping it, or getting the rod out, but I can’t change the past.
I can just remember it.
And feel it too, no less.
It’s been a day now since my last sentence. I thought I’d continue it after my breakfast, but things got in the way.
Chores, people, excuses.
But now there’s nothing I can hide behind.
Just like back then.
Let’s just say that everything came to a boiling point on one very unassuming day.
I remember that I woke up, the dread that my dreams always kept at bay washing over me like a fog. I went to school, and things got a bit better.
Then I came home, and the fog fell on me once again.
I tried to escape it, and so I went to my room to finish my homework.
I could feel it building outside my door, and I indeed tried to ignore it, but just like with the glass rod, once you notice it, and you think about it, ignorance is as good as gone.
It wasn’t long before it started to seep under my door.
Each step my father took up the stairs made the fog reach closer and closer.
The knob turned, and in a flash, my surroundings became hazy as can be.
I became lost in a dense fog.
As my father entered my room and sat on my bed, I stiffened like a statue.
The only clear thing about him was his voice.
“Steph,” I remember him saying, “is something wrong?”
Comforting words, no?
Well, I sure as hell didn’t find them comforting.
I didn’t know how to describe it back then, but now I really do get it.
His foot was right under my belly button.
It had always been there, threatening to push down and shatter the rod within me.
As he talked, and droned, and said the words you’d expect from any concerned parent, my hands were gradually fading away.
The haziness was inching and crawling ever so closer to my head, each word that came out of his mouth making myself less and less visible to my eyes.
And it’s only when he mentioned my skimping on a date with a boy from my school that the fog reached my neck and I finally said what I wanted to say.
“Dad,” I said, the fog inches away from forever drowning my voice, “I…I want to live with mom.”
And just like that, the mist was gone, as though it had never been there in the first place.
My dad was silent.
My room was clear.
And I realized that I had been crying.
I turned to look at him, and was met only with a blank stare.
And that’s the moment when I understood that if I didn’t do what I knew I had to do at that moment, I would forever be imprisoned by the walls of that house.
Without a word, I got up and made my way out.
My dad chased after me, asking me what was wrong, that he was willing to listen, and that we could work things out. When I grabbed the handle of our front door, he grabbed my wrist with just as much force. I looked in his eyes for the second time that night, and in them I saw concern and sadness and hurt.
I contemplated what to do. He was still talking and pleading with me to stay, practically begging on his knees. My grip on the handle loosened, but that’s when the other secret I’d been keeping from him bubbled up to the surface.
“Dad,” I said with my gaze pointed straight at him, both of our eyes a hot mess of tears, “I…I-I like g-girls and I don’t know what about that is so hard to understand.”
Silence followed this statement; one I shall never forget.
I felt like I was on the verge of being crushed to paste, and when my father stood up, and I expected the worst, all that happened was his hand leaving my wrist.
I looked up, and saw that his face no longer exuded any kind of sadness or hurt.
Just disappointment.
“Well,” he said, his voice as steady as a cliff,” then maybe it’s best you…go …”
And with those words, the boot that threatened me for the better part of my teenage life finally made good of its purpose.
The rod inside of me shattered.
I was left speechless and in pain.
That was the price I had to pay for having strayed off from the script he had written for me.
I was in shock from the sudden blow, and I left my house in shock, not even wearing any shoes, and I was in a state of shock until I reached my mother’s doorstep.
The next day, boxes with all of my things appeared on her doorstep.
I still haven’t talked to my father since then.
I was only able to remove most of the shards with help of my wonderful mother and my supportive friends.
Another day has passed since my last sentence.
Fitting, I should say.
A page is being turned.
The coffee in my mug is as still as a mirror.
I sip it freely, but there was once a time when I couldn’t do so, for I couldn’t bear to look at myself.
Why is that?
Well, it used to remind me of the second time I found myself filled with broken glass.
“Fool me once, shame on you” goes the saying.
That was my mentality after the whole escapade with my father.
It allowed me to heal and see the good in life again.
I finished high school, and then it was time to go to university.
A fresh start far away from home.
I was sad to leave my mother and my old friends (though I didn’t mind leaving behind all the memories of the ridiculous dates I’d had), but at the same time, I looked forward to the new start I would be given.
I thought it would be beautiful, and indeed it was.
I found myself surrounded by wonderful people who I never thought existed, people I wished I knew before, and whom I’m grateful I’ve met.
Well, all besides one.
For the sake of his story, let’s call him “Vic”.
Mind you that his real name was much less threatening than that.
Anyhow, I met “Vic” in my second year. I still remember it like it was yesterday. A friend of mine had a birthday party, and I naturally went there to have a great time. I’ll spare you of the finer details, but at one point I sat down in one of the chairs, tired from dancing, and I still remember the wonderful feeling I had.
A feeling where everything was alright and everything would continue to be alright, but little did I know at the time that this couldn’t be the farthest thing from the truth.
My fate was sealed the moment this skinny and stoic looking guy sat right next to me.
As he sat cross legged, something about his oozing and – in hindsight – juvenile confidence made me start up a conversation with him.
He introduced himself, and I introduced myself, and I made it clear I was a lesbian from the get go, and he seemed unbothered by this. The party ended, and we hadn’t stopped talking, and when we finally left, we did so only after having exchanged numbers.
“You seem like you’d be a good friend,” I remember him telling me, and how right he was, for I’d let him slip his glass rod inside of me without a second thought.
I just got back from work.
So, I’ll continue the story.
Me and “Vic” became fast friends. Things went well at first. He was a bit of an introvert, and always needed that push from me to socialize, but he never complained.
We complimented each other in a way.
Time flew by fast.
My mother, and even my father, had always told me that time flies fast, that it slips out of your hands like seemingly never-ending sand, but I didn’t fully understand that until I found myself on that podium receiving my long-awaited degree.
It was there that I reflected back on my life, my college life, and remembered everything in detail.
Vic had dropped out, and I hadn’t heard from him in a while.
And I do admit that I had forgotten about him.
But as if by fate, which I do curse now, I received a call from him.
I’d heard bits and pieces about what had happened to Vic after he’d dropped out – got involved with a gang, his mother died, failed abortion.
A sad fairytale was what I’d found myself in.
Vid didn’t have anywhere to go anymore, and he needed me, his good friend, to give him shelter. And you know what?
I did give him shelter.
After I became employed and got my own apartment, I invited Vic and let him sleep on my couch.
I felt bad for him, so I didn’t even hesitate.
And needless to say, things began to go downhill not too long after that.
Vic had changed since the last time I’d seen him.
He’d shed his introverted nature in favor of a more aggressively gregarious one. Almost all day he’d be out of the house getting into God knows what. Only once the sun had set would he come back, always reeking of something new, before crashing on my couch and not waking up until the next day.
He didn’t pay for anything or do any chores.
A typical story, don’t you think?
Well, one day, I came home early and found that Vic had been hosting a party without my permission.
I tried to chase everyone out, but they only laughed at me.
That was, of course, until I threatened to call the police from the doorway (ready to close and lock the door should they give chase).
But to my surprise, they all started to pool out almost immediately, and then it was just me, Vic, and the filthy mess everyone had made.
I remember sighing, but Vic wasn’t relaxed by any means. By all standards, he was absolutely livid.
As you might imagine, a very loud and very angry argument ensued.
I didn’t even realise how much I had been keeping in until it all came spilling out.
Whatever he had to tell me was unceremoniously subdued by every ounce of frustration I was venting at that moment.
And then I was done, and we both found ourselves standing in front of each other, in the living room, surrounded by a heavy silence.
Vic was speechless, and he looked at me with the eyes of a puppy, but I’m quite sure that at that moment, my eyes resembled that of a predator.
Soon, his pleading pupils dilated as his brow furrowed and his face took on the appearance of a small child who’d been denied his favorite toy for far too long.
I had forgotten about the glass rod I’d let Vic put in me, but I remembered it pretty quickly when he pulled his gun on me.
His hand trembled furiously, but not out of fear, mind you, but out of a childish and uncontrollable rage.
Up until now, the glass rod had never once moved, because despite everything, I still believed in Vic that he could change.
But at that moment, with the barrel of that pistol pointed straight at me, I knew that he was beyond hope.
And I feared that I too was beyond hope at that moment.
Vic was saying something, but I wasn’t focused on it in the least.
The barrel stared at me like his third eye, a pupil dilated to its utter limit so that it may take in everything.
The glass rod was cracking, hairline fractures holding back a cascade of broken shards that wanted nothing more or less than to rip my insides to shreds.
My mind boiled and bubbled for the better part of the confrontation, and then something happened which made it go tepid at the drop of a hat.
Vic pulled the trigger.
A steel toed boot shattered the rod and coated my insides in innumerable shards, biting every which way.
But the gun hadn’t fired.
I’m sure that he was caught off guard just as much as I had.
For one brief moment right before I turned tail to run, I saw the safety latch on the side of the gun. It was on, and as you can expect, I didn’t miss a beat in making the most out of this divine opportunity.
Despite the indescribable pain that I felt, I managed to lumber down the stairs as I could still barely hear Vic.
But when I heard the first shot after he’d finally taken off the safety, I ran down the cold street, my coat flying behind me like a parachute that threatened to slow me down.
Each step I took blended my insides further, and although it felt like I was running through water, I, nonetheless, made it to my friend, Sasha’s house
Even though I had made it out without having sustained any kind of injury, how I felt was still far from alright.
After a brief explanation to Sasha (which made her seem even more scared than I had been) I hurried to the upstairs bathroom where I proceeded to lock myself in and sit on the floor, utterly exhausted – both mentally and physically – from that night’s ordeal.
I got my phone out to text my mother, but as I was typing, Vic called just as my finger was about to press a button.
A button right in place where the answer button was.
In the interval between me accidentally answering my phone and hanging up (which took about as long to do as reading a faithful Nabokov stanza), I heard Vic shouting something along the lines of “I’LL FIND YOU AND I WILL MAKE SURE TH-“.
The thought that I, and to an extent my friends and family, could still be in danger, as his words no doubt implied, filled me with a dread that pushed those damned shards deeper than any syringe could ever go. My nerves felt like they had been spliced to oblivion, but I still somehow found a way to stand up and leave the bathroom.
It’s strange.
I went to sleep after writing about Vic, but I didn’t dream about him.
At least I think I didn’t.
When I woke up today (day three, if I’m right), I opened the journal on my nightstand, ready to scribble down whatever dreams I’d had (recently, I haven’t been waking up in the middle of the night anymore) but to my dismay, nothing came to mind. I was sure I’d been a part of a vivid dream, so real it makes you question the waking world, but I remembered absolutely nothing.
And so, I take it as a sign that I should just get on with the story.
Let’s just say that I was a bit of a mess after my confrontation with Vic, and in the following days. I was worried sick that he’d show up out of nowhere to hurt my friends or my family, and I must’ve spent at least a solid week couch ridden with stale muscles, dried tear ducts, and enough cortisol to make any heart shrivel up like the lungs of a lifelong chain-smoker.
I was a wreck, to put it simply.
But after the seventh day, when it felt like my body was collapsing into itself like a beached whale, I remembered what Vic had said to me, but instead of feeling fear this time, I felt a seething and scalding anger the likes of which I haven’t felt since.
I was angry that I had been reduced to such a state.
I imagined bludgeoning that fucker’s face in with a sledge hammer, or throwing him off of the Empire State building, and a number of other creative ways of disposal that I care not to mention for fear of distracting from the point of this story.
The point of this is that I’d had enough.
I was fed up.
And I decided to take action.
I did so by moving out of my friend’s house, applying to a few new positions, and getting a new house.
I wonder if I saw that house in my dreams.
It really was a nice house.
A quaint two-story Carpenter gothic home.
A dream house of mine to say the least.
I can’t remember why, but for some reason I recall feeling safe there, in that little oversized shed with modern plumbing.
I was in the middle of nowhere.
And yet I’d never felt safer from the outside.
It was like my own private base camp, safe and isolated from the chaos of the outside.
I thought that I’d finally outwitted my demons.
But one phrase still nagged me.
“Fool me twice, shame on me.”
That was my mentality when I met Arthur.
Arthur was a co-worker of mine.
And he also happens to be the third man to have put a glass rod in me.
One that I never noticed until it was far too late.
But…that comes later.
What comes now, or rather what came before, was my work relation with him.
I first met Arthur when I was assigned to a new project, and he was one of my team members.
Arthur was a few years younger than me, fresh out of college, and had that eagerness about him that all new corporate recruits have (before it’s crushed by the corporation, that is).
This was a hell of a workload, so Arthur and I often had to work nights as our other less productive team members would always retire the moment day turned to night.
Not me and Arthur though.
We’d work well into the early hours of the morning, and often find ourselves talking about a wide range of topics. He was quite knowledgeable, and…I enjoyed talking to him about anything and everything that came to mind.
He was sweet and sensitive and never complained whenever I’d tell him to rework a section of a report or to even scrap it.
Fast forward to a couple of months and the two of us were both promoted thanks to that project, the one which got us closer.
And…to celebrate, Arthur asked me out to a fancy work lunch at an expensive restaurant and I…I went.
Dressed in my best clothes and him too.
I can still remember it even as I write this.
Guess a few loose shards made it deeper than I expected.
We were surrounded by people, drinking, eating and enjoying themselves, and that’s what we were doing too.
Things really were…going well.
That was until Arthur started to look nervous.
I thought that it was cute at first, but as the night dragged on, and he began to sweat more profusely, I began to worry.
It wasn’t worry for another person.
It was worry about your own well-being.
A feeling of uncomfortableness your gut warns you with, it’s wails reverberating through your insides like a grenade in a pond.
And then it happened.
Arthur asked me out and…it shattered.
My heart that is.
In that moment, it hit me that throughout all my conversations with him during those weeks,I had never revealed to Arthur that I was a lesbian.
And when my brain connected two and two together, and I looked back on the whole evening, I felt like crying for some reason.
Because I knew that he was about to learn the truth in what was no doubt a humiliating way.
I knew he would learn it because I knew I would tell him.
And…I did.
And then something really did shatter.
I heard it when the words came out of my mouth and sailed through the air and right into his eager ears.
He didn’t cry.
His face didn’t sour.
He was smiling, and even gave a nervous, apologetic chuckle of sorts.
But none of that made me feel any better.
Arthur did his best to play the whole thing down, and even made some self-deprecating jokes to lighten the mood, but I still remained unconvinced.
My mind knew full well what it had heard.
And it played it on repeat for me to endlessly hear.
I kept hearing it as Arthur talked.
I kept hearing it as we both awkwardly bid each other goodnight.
I kept hearing it as I drove home.
Even the rain that was falling wasn’t enough to drown it out.
And I kept hearing and hearing it without fail until I stepped through my door, absolutely drenched due to my hesitation to go into my own quaint house.
And it was then, in my living room, after I flipped on the light switch, that what I had heard finally clicked..
A glass rod shattering.
But not mine.
Arthur’s.
I’d…put a rod in him, right into his extended urethra, just like Dean Allen Cole would.
And I had stepped on it, heels and all, with every ounce of might that my frame could possibly allow me.
And all night he’d had to bear the pain while looking at the one who’d inflicted it on him.
All night he’d worried about the gazes of everyone else, absolutely terrified of them finding out.
But then I found myself in my bathroom, my eyes pierced by their own gaze, and with a growing sickness I was confronted with the fact that it had been me who’d belittled him with sight.
The looks of pity.
The looks of frustration.
The looks of awkwardness.
All of them had come from me.
Web-like cracks that spread the longer the dinner dragged on.
I hadn’t shattered the rod immediately.
I’d taken my sweet, sweet time until it finally gave way to the pressure I was exerting.
It shattered and the cascading fractures never stopped reverberating in my head.
The pelting of the rain outside my window now felt like the incessant banging of a mob trying to get in.
I felt judged and condemned by the world itself at that moment.
I could feel that the fog was back again, tickling and stroking my skin as it slowly crawled up my legs.
But then it withdrew without warning.
It desperately tried to reach me, but to no avail, kept at bay by a force that had no intention of letting it slithering an inch higher.
And that’s when I heard it.
Amidst the endless strafing from the clouds outside, I heard a single sound that was louder and less frequent.
A knock.
A bolt of lightning flashed in the distance, and the lights in my bathroom immediately went out, just as a wave of thunder shook the air.
And in the darkness that my mirror now showed me, I saw them.
Eyes.
Two eyes.
Two richly yellow eyes with slit pupils cutting through the glass of my window and looking straight at me.
The knocks of the unknown creature didn’t stop, and so I went over to the window.
Even though I opened it just a crack, the assault of the rain from outside pushed it further, allowing the shadow with yellow eyes to lunge in.
I quickly closed the window and felt a wave of panic rush through me. It was too dark to see anything, but I was sure that whatever had come in was still in the bathroom with me.
And then I heard it.
A meow.
The fog was gone now.
The lights came back on again, and I found myself face to face with the quaintest cat you can imagine.
Eyes like impeccably polished citrine gemstones and long fur like the bristles of used oil brushes.
The cat came up to me and rubbed its fur – softer than I had initially given it credit for – against my leg. I picked it up carefully, worried it would scratch, but instead, it purred gregariously in my arms and licked my skin.
I’d made a new male friend that night, one I thought, amidst the tears of joy and heart-warming purring, I could finally trust.
Little did I know at that moment that another rod had been put inside of me.
…
Things happened…unprecedently fast after the cat – Jasper – came into my life.
When I went back to work, I found that Arthur had quit.
I think it was about a week after he quit (roughly two weeks after Jasper had come into my life) when the police knocked at my door.
According to the officers, after our altercation, Vic had apparently gone back to live with his mother in the outskirts of town, and he’d been found the day before in the woods mauled to the point of being almost unrecognizable.
They just wanted to ask me a few questions since the camera in our apartment complex had caught me fleeing from him that day. I was assured that I wasn’t a suspect since they’d checked my alibi and it had been airtight.
The questioning lasted for about an hour, and I did have to answer my fair share of questions.
Jasper was quite skittish during this process, hiding behind a corner and hissing loudly when one of the cops bent down to pet him.
Things became oddly peaceful after this.
With the threat of Vic now gone, I felt free to enjoy my life to its fullest.
It was just me and Jasper for about a month, and there wasn’t any cat in the whole world more affectionate than him.
Following my company’s merger with another, a party was held to break the ice between employees of the company we’d absorbed, and it was at this party – a party that I will always remember – where I met her.
Angie.
It wasn’t so much that my heart was pierced by Cupid’s arrow as much as I’d fallen head-first in a pit full of them.
Her shoulder length hair coiled like a parade of snakes and her eyes seemed to level everything before them, including me.
She – like me – seemed to be the only other person who looked uncomfortable at this party, and I said fuck it.
I decided to talk to her.
And…I’m still not sure if I regret it or not.
Things moved quickly after that.
A friendly greeting turned into a friendly conversation.
That somehow ended up turning into a friendly meeting.
And then…we were a couple.
These last three sentences took me over an hour to write.
I kept rewriting and deleting words, the memories of my times with Angie bubbling up after laying at the bottom of my mind for more than I’m willing to admit.
These were fantastic memories, and for once, I really did feel like I belonged, and I can only hope that I gave her the same feeling as well.
Everything was as good as it could possibly be, but then things…started to go downhill when Angie moved in with me.
It was around this time that Jasper began to act out.
Throughout this entire time, I’d felt myself grow more distant from Jasper, and he didn’t like that one bit, but when Angie moved in with me, my once affectionate cat seemed to change overnight.
No longer was he eager to eat food or lay in my lap.
He’d always scratch and screech at Angie if she so much as looked at him.
Bad as they were, the two of us still tolerated his behavior and thought of it as nothing more than a pet being resistant to sudden change.
And then something else changed.
Something for the worst.
The company that me and Angie both worked for underwent a massive wave of layoffs, and Angie didn’t make the cut.
She was a wonderful and hard worker, and I was convinced that the sole reason for her firing had been because she was openly Bi (I’d managed to escape such a fate because I’d kept my lesbianism a secret). I wanted to press charges, to spread a video online, basically anything that could help my girlfriend regain her earned position.
But Angie didn’t care, and so I put thoughts of revenge at the back of my mind as per her wishes.
Less workers meant more workload for me, which in turn meant more late nights at the office, which in turn meant less time with my wonderful girlfriend.
I’d often find myself exasperated in front of my haughty screen, only for Angie to give me a quick call and fill me with all of the energy in the world.
She’d tell me how she missed me, the delicious things she’d prepared for the two of us, what prospective jobs she was interviewing for or had been rejected from, and Jasper, as always, was still a handful, but nothing she couldn’t handle.
Things at this point were stressful for the both of us, but whatever time we’d managed to spend together made it all worthwhile ten times over.
But as days turned into months, I found my relationship with Angie becoming more and more strained.
At first, it started with our phone calls becoming shorter and shorter.
Then she wouldn’t call at all.
Then we saw less and less of each other at home, until we felt like strangers.
I sure as hell wasn’t blind to this by any means.
But Angie sure as hell wasn’t sharing jack.
I pondered over the issue for several days, until one day when Angie had left the house and I took this as an opportunity to clean it.
But when I lifted a corner of our shared bed to change the sheets, I found a large, thin, and unassuming notebook under it.
One look at the contents and I could tell immediately that this was Angie’s (due to the distinct handwriting).
Flipping through it, I found myself confronted with page after page describing vehement nightmares.
Almost all the entries followed the same general layout.
They’d describe Angie in her room at night, while trying to sleep, and a horrible monster coming through the doorway. She’d find herself unable to move as this monster, whatever it was, would run its claws along her body, and it would only go away when I’d come from work.
The journal described how my girlfriend couldn’t stand my cat because it “smelled just like the monster”.
I flipped through months-worth of pages upon pages and entry after entry.
I read each and every word, until of course, Angie came home from another interview.
That was the night we had our first true fight.
It’s a good thing we didn’t have any neighbors.
We were screaming at each other, pointing fingers, and crying at the same time.
I confronted her about the notes and, at first, she was pissed that I’d read through her private thoughts. Angie kept going on about how she thought that the dreams were a sign that I was changing and that she was afraid of me coming home; that she didn’t want to see the person I had become. But then, quite suddenly I might say, in the middle of a sentence, she broke down crying and apologizing.
But I was still angry and frustrated.
I regret a lot of things in my life, but most of them are what I told Angie that night.
When it was all said and done, my lungs felt as though I’d had to inflate a car tire, and Angie looked at me speechless.
She wasn’t crying anymore.
And I knew that something far worse was happening behind those eyes.
That’s when everything I’d said finally reached my ears.
But by the time regret had come, it was far too late.
A week of silence passed.
I just remembered a Samuel Beckett Quote.
“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
I’d say I…disagree with that. Every word is like a brush stroke on nothingness. Without them, life is something blank and meaningless.
None of us would speak, so everything was blank.
Now, I wish I’d picked up my brush sooner.
I remember sitting on my porch, with Jasper purring on my lap.
Angie was inside, and I just stared at the quiet darkness in front of me.
I started to talk to Jasper, meekly venting about my problems.
I told him that I was tired of the silence.
Tomorrow, after coming from work, I would break it.
I resolved to do so.
Jasper had stopped purring by that point.
I knew he wasn’t asleep.
Instead, both of us sat in silence.
Well, that was a lot, wasn’t it?
My fingers do feel rather numb.
I’m stopping now at this point.
This next part…I’ll have to sleep on it.
…
The day in question had arrived. Throughout the whole day I couldn’t focus one single bit on the work that had been assigned to me. Instead, I anxiously monitored each and every tick of the office clock, waiting for five to finally roll around.
The phone rang once at around three, but I didn’t pick it up.
After much anticipation (mixed with the expected amount of dread), I opened my eyes after a hard blink and found myself driving to my house out in the woods.
I’m not sure now, but I swear that I remember fog along the road as I drove closer and closer.
I did finally arrive, but when I tried to open the door, it wouldn’t budge at all. I fiddled with the knob for a bit before a sudden sensation on my shin made me jump back.
Jasper had come out of the small dog hatch, and my heart sank deep into my stomach when I saw that he was covered in blood.
Waiting for the authorities to arrive felt like it took even longer than waiting for five o’clock to come around.
I’ve wondered a lot about why I didn’t just kick down the door or try harder to get in. I like to think and believe that the mind works and rationalizes differently in times of stress, and while I do believe that to be true, it feels disgusting to justify my inaction like that.
Two officers came, and one of them knocked down the door, and in the house, behind said door, is where we found Angie.
Her body anyhow.