“Take this every night, with a minimum of 350 calories. Primarily protein.” My psychiatrist had told me, sending an e-script for a $1,200 medication to my pharmacy. Thank god for government insurance.
I’d finally told her the truth I’d kept hidden. I’d always told everyone I was just afraid of the dark. Everyone except whoever was my partner at the time. It was a good enough excuse, for a long time, until my father made me go get my suitcase from the car alone in the dark.
I remember sobbing at the doorstep, telling him I couldn’t do it. I was shaking, and snotting everywhere. Pure fear was written across my face. I was sixteen at the time, and that was the last night he ever told me that I’d ‘get over it’ one day. I think he realized it wouldn’t ever go away, because he looked at me with a soft sympathy I rarely saw from my father. I love him to bits, but he’s more of the ‘buck up and get it done’ type.
The truth behind nights of panicking at the prospect of taking out the trash, or putting off showers for weeks, or huddling in the corner of my bed with all the lights on, or staying on the phone sobbing with my partner at the time until 4am…was that I truly believed something was after me. Something inhuman. Something that was capable of things worse than death. That if I mentioned it, it would know. And it would come after me sooner.
How do you explain that fear to someone who’s never experienced it? Truthfully, how? You can’t. I learned that early on.
I distinctly remember laying on my mother’s couch at 14, praying (back when I still believed in God) to just let me live until I was sixteen. Don’t let It get me. Please, please, just until sixteen. Then it was eighteen.
Finally, at 19, my partner at the time had enough.
“I can’t do this anymore.” His voice was gravel with sleep, coming from my phone. My lips quivered as tears streamed down my face. I was pacing in my bedroom at five in the morning, all the lights on in the whole apartment, trying to stave off what lurked in the dark. Whatever It was. It didn’t have a name. It just…was.
“Please. Please. I’ll see my psychiatrist. Please just give me time.” I begged him then. I didn’t want to go back to nights alone, in the dark, waiting to be taken off to whatever hell lurked in the abyss. I’d suspected I was bipolar for a long time. My mother had been. Which was why I didn’t want to get diagnosed- didn’t want to resign myself to the fact that my beliefs weren’t real. But I finally broke that night.
Of course, he left me anyways. Fuck him. I found myself leaving my psychiatrist office and picking up my medication. I was careful to watch the time, but I only managed to make it back at dusk. Night was quickly approaching. I hurried inside, closed all the blinds, turned all the lights on, and checked the door and window locks eight times. Then I checked every single space in my apartment that something that wasn’t human but was as tall as one, could conceivably hide in. It took me two hours.
I sat down on my couch, staring at the prescription and new diagnosis sheet I’d been given. Bipolar type one. Delusions. And Latuda, to take for it. Here’s hoping I never lose my insurance, because fuck that medication is expensive. I still felt in danger, but the feeling managed to remain lurking rather than sheer-terror I was going to feel before bed. I ate a small tub of ice cream with the medication, hoping the dairy counted as protein, and went to sleep.
First days, then weeks, then a month passed. And then three years. First, I was able to shower on my own, without worrying about something hiding in the bathroom. Then, I was able to sleep…more or less comfortably. It wasn’t perfect, but I felt…safe, in my bedroom. I cannot express to you how much I cried at that realization. Safety, after a lifetime of the opposite. I could leave my blinds open and not worry about something staring back at me from the darkness. I could go to sleep without the fear of death or worse plauging me. Then I was able to go outside at night. With others only, but still.
Eventually, I picked up a new job by my apartment complex. As you all know, gas prices? Absolutely nuts. It was within walking distance. Nights only. It was the ultimate test, and my boyfriend was- has been- so incredibly supportive. He walked me home every night until the 27th. I left that night at 9:30, carrying leftover food from work under one arm, and reading a text on my phone with the other hand. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. An elongated figure, standing in the trees as I turned the corner onto my street. Just standing there. I felt the familiar terror. The terror you feel when you know your life is about to end. That I hadn’t felt in so very long.
I tried to tell my boyfriend and our roommate when I got home, but they brushed it off as a person just…being weird. It was student housing mostly, so someone drunk off their ass in the woods was easily explainable. But the figure looked wrong, and the amount of terror I felt looking at it told me I wasn’t imagining things.
It spiraled from there.
Footsteps in the snow outside of my bedroom window. Tapping on the glass at 3am. Handprints on my bathroom mirror, etched from the steam of the shower. I grew more and more paranoid. I began checking the locks again. The cabinets. Under my bed.
I woke up one night at 3am to take a hit of my vape. I usually woke up four times a night to do so. I know, I KNOW it’s a nasty habit especially for people with bipolar. Sue me. I’ve already heard the lectures. When I went to roll over to reach into my drawer, I saw it. A face peering up at me from under my bed. But it wasn’t…human. I don’t know what the fuck it was. I only saw the upper half. The bald head, the grey skin, the eyes. Oh god, the eyes. They started right into me and everything I was. I just have screamed, because suddenly I felt myself being pulled back into the bed by my partner, his soft and concerned eyes searching my face in worry.
He turned the lights on. I was babbling, trying to explain to him what I saw. I made him check under the bed, check every cabinet, check the locks. He came back to bed, pulling the covers over our two bodies, and pulled my back against his chest as his warm arms wrapped around me. Security.
“There’s nothing here, love. You’re safe. I promise. You were just dreaming.”
But I wasn’t. I stopped sleeping after that. Or I tried. Every time I would fall asleep, I would see it again. I fell asleep in the bath, and it was peeking from behind the bathroom door. I fell asleep on the couch and it was under the coffee table like a fucking cat. I fell asleep in the car one day, only waking up when I felt something brush against my shoulder. I spotted it in the rearview mirror and almost crashed into a tree. Someone called the cops. I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital that night.
And so here I am. In a facility where they fuck with my meds. The meds work. I know they do. No one believes me. Even as I’m typing this on my phone they so gratefully let me keep (seeing as I’m not a danger to myself) I can see It out of the corner of my eye. It’s waiting until I’m alone. Lights out is in four hours. Lights out, where I’ll be locked in my room alone. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it’ll do to me. But I know it’s a fate worse than death, and no one will ever find me again. There’ll be no body to find.
Lights out is in four hours. I’m so afraid.