It has me. I know it does. I can feel it, like long, cold fingers of shame gripping my fragile bones and crushing them slowly into dust.
Before I start, I think I had better explain what “it” is. It has haunted me since I was a child. It always has. I think it always will. When I was little, I had an invisible friend. Except, despite what everyone told me, I knew it couldn’t be imaginary. It felt too real. When I was happy or playing, I would feel it there, looming over me, dragging me down like a dead weight into the ocean. Dull water would fill my small lungs and I soon learnt not to ever enjoy myself too much. Not when it could be watching. Whenever I looked in the mirror, it would be standing beside me. Eventually, I gave up, not daring to feel. I did as it wished, I isolated myself from my peers, I barely ate or drank, I even killed the small birds and rodents in the backyard when it asked me to. Therapist after therapist told my struggling parents that I desperately needed treatment, or some sort of help, but I can’t help it, and no amount of calm talking or dream diaries would help that. Almost my entire childhood was spent in hospitals either from malnourishment or injuries it made me give myself.
Aged 20, I would use my lunch break from my job as a waiter (it would get me fired from almost anywhere else) to go down to the library and conduct research on what it could possibly be, what it could mean, how I could try to stop it, but to no avail. I returned day after day each time a little more hopeless than the last, until I stopped trying altogether. Nowadays, I have barely stopped doing anything at all. My brothers and sisters are all successful, but I, age 43, live in my parents’ basement, unemployed and depressed, powerless to create a future or even a present for myself. Hell, I barely even have a past.
Recently, however, I fear it may have something worse in store for me. In the years I have spent wasting away on the spare bed, it has been brooding, lying not in despair but in wait, in preparation. That must be why I have been feeling its grip on my heart a little tighter, with each beat feeling an icy breath on my shoulder. That must be why I’m driving away now, with my parents bound tightly in the backseat of the stolen car. That must be why I’m doing these things. I’m not choosing to. I have to. It makes me. It is it, not me, ignoring the people screaming and shouting for me to hit the brakes as I race towards the edge of the bridge. It is it, not me, that pushes the accelerator to the floor with a final roar of power, sending the car plummeting down to the icy waters below. But when I look into the rear view mirror, it is the weathered old face of it that I see in my own reflection. It is me, not it, that realises far too late the mistake I have made. It is me, not it, that tosses the empty bottle out the car window in disgust. It is me, not it, that sinks far too terribly into the cruel waters below as they fill my lungs one last time.
In a world full of pain, it was it that got the best of me.