I keep the doors shut in my flat. This is primarily practical (heat retention, which has become a more pressing need in recent months due to recent geopolitical issues) but also probably has more than a little to do with me and my brother being asked, many times, by my father if I had ‘been raised in a barn’ every time I left one open growing up. It reminds me of him, in easier times, by following the little rule.
Fairly normal thing, want to get it out of the way before we get into why this is causing a specific problem.
Enter boyfriend. Similar ‘barn chat’ scenario. Though, he grew up really rurally so, frankly, I’m not entirely convinced he didn’t. His behaviour over the last few weeks also really convinced me that, whilst I love him, if these kind of habits are what living outwith a city does to someone then we are never moving so much as a foot out of here. Anyway, I guess that perception has been complicated somewhat.
So it’s really weird, and initially I was geared up to delve into relationship advice because it felt red-flag-adjacent at best and I didn’t know how the fuck to address it.
Basically, we moved in together a few months ago. I basically packed up my own flat and rented it out (all above board, HMRC fully aware) and moved in. We haven’t been together that long, it’ll be a year in June (first Reddit relationship advice sin) but we’re both fully fledged adults looking for the same things. We have good jobs and minimal debt, and normal friends. Between us, we have two weird exes, so we’re both pretty attuned to spotting warning signs. I love him, we’re hitting 30 soon, we moved in together at the start of October.
Naturally, as I’ve just moved in with my partner, things are bliss. It is a routine of breakfast, banging and foot massages. He tells me every day that he loves me, and (endearingly) that I am the most wonderfully weird person he has met (yeah, more on that later). Apart from the weird pranks/ sociopathic idiosyncrasies I had noticed as of late, it was fine.
So, first time I noticed this was the start of January. Conceivably this had been happening since October, but it’s such a busy time around the festive period I’ve maybe been too preoccupied to see. It was the 1st. I was hangover personified, sick with the flu, and so I was basically intending to lightly poach myself in a bath until this all blew over. The bath faces away from the door. At some point, I glance at the door because I’ve resolved to try and read a book instead of absently scrolling.
And, for whatever reason, I just know he is behind the door. When you’re close to someone you get a real sense of them and the way they move (or don’t). I couldn’t see him, couldn’t see a shadow, but I knew it was him. I called out to him asking if he needed in (though of course unprepared to give up my bath unless his bowels were in dire shape). No response. Thought, ‘that’s fucking odd’. After a bit, I’m so uncomfortable that I have to get out the bath. In the time I was getting dressed that sense of him standing there faded away. I get out, and he is in the kitchen making tea. Whatever the vibes are for ‘I have been lurking outside a bathroom’ are, he was not giving them.
Over the last few weeks, he’s doing it more and more. Every time we are together in the flat and in different rooms, I can feel him outside the door of the room I’m in. More recently I thought because I was getting used to identifying it, because I could hear him breathe and the floorboards creak as he steps towards it, but sometimes it’s still just completely silent and it seems to almost escalate in how the atmosphere changes when it happens. An aura of tension surrounds the perimeter, ebbing and radiating into the air of any room I am in. It’s like whenever he’s behind the door then he’s like a coiled spring, something ready to strike. But to do what to me, and to what end? The former were more infuriating, because obviously I can hear him and so he knows that I know he’s there, but the latter started to get pretty unsettling pretty fast. They made my skin crawl. I could never bring myself to open the door, it felt like opening a can of worms I wasn’t prepared to deal with.
It reminded me of when, as midst my brother used to tease me by standing outside my bedroom door late at night. But that was just trying to get a rise out of me in the usual back-and-forth ‘who can cause the more psychological damage’ games that siblings inevitably grow into. I talk about my brother a lot to him, keeping the memory alive, but I never mentioned about that. I talk about the funny things, the good things. I don’t talk about the weird stuff, it seems to intertwined with the period where he started to decline. One of the last times I heard him speak was when he was remorseful for the pranks, maybe a week prior to him going missing, apologising and saying that he needed to stop. So, whatever it is (and I had thought about whatever it could be) it wasn’t like a twisted ‘from the behind’ prank.
This was the same but different. It was a different context. It wasn’t dumb kids trying to freak each other out. And it was like at that point I realised ‘I am living with a man I have known less than a year, who is standing threateningly behind doors and I don’t know what he’ll do to me if I open them’.
But then I’d spend time with him and he was just… the normal dude I’d met. And those times outnumbered the doors. And it had only been a few weeks. So on the one hand I was with this great guy, and then on the other hand I was with some sort of maniacal reincarnation of a children’s game I’d rather forget about.
It came to a head yesterday. I was in the shower, and even with shampoo in my eyes I just felt it. I felt him standing there, through the door, breathing softly against the wood. And I was just fucking sick of it. And I’m fairly certain I can take him in a fight, because he’s just a fucking accountant doing Couch To 5k. So I got out, and in the most intimidating way a naked woman with ‘no more tears’ strawberry shampoo on can be, I opened the fucking door.
What met me, was the same look on my boyfriends face that he got that time he won an argument about the best place to keep all the socks. He just looked really fucking… benignly pleased with himself?
And he said, within the same heartbeat, ‘See! It’s fucking weird, isn’t it’
So at this point, the big scary unknown is just standing there in his pyjamas, holding a beer and his phone open on a news article about the downfall of Sunderland football club (obviously the standing was getting boring at some stage??) looking like he’s just won the worlds dumbest argument.
And as I’m realising this, he is in tandem seeing a very scared, very angry version of his girlfriend about to jump over the threshold and strangle him.
There is, at that point, a pause that feels like it could stretch into eternity.
I ask him, eventually, to kindly explain what the fuck he is talking about.
He looked more cautious then, doubtful. And then he gathered himself and said he could ask me the same thing and that it’s been driving him up the wall.
Cue me crying and hitting him with a damp hairbrush around the hall, him flinching trying not to get his tshirt wet, amusement turning to genuine concern as I upended the beer can over his head. I called him every name under the sun, I threatened to have him sectioned, I threatened to phone my mum, I threatened to phone his mum. And then he starts trying to get me to calm down, face somewhere between confusion and looking like he’s made some sort of massive error.
‘So, you haven’t been doing this to me?’
Fucking of course I’ve not been doing this to you, John. There is only one lunatic lurking behind closed doors and it’s the one covered in Asahi Super Dry.
He becomes upset, remorseful.
So, apparently, at the start of January, every time he’s been playing computer games he thinks I’ve been standing outside the door spying on him. He’s got the sense that I’m angry at him, waiting for him, about to have a go with him. Naturally, not wanting to rise to it, he waits until I go away and when he finds me he just sees me doing something else, and there’s no anger incoming. It’s like I’ve not even done it.
Obviously, he now realised he can’t exactly say why he thought I was there. He just had a sense it was me. But he never heard me speak or do anything, never heard anything at all. And he now feels rather foolish and rather wet, because obviously I haven’t been. So he chooses to go on a snack run, leaving me in a blanket in the living room, to try and prevent his scared, nervous girlfriend from stabbing him with the kitchen utensils.
And this would be fine, and I’d have left it at this being my slightly paranoid partner trying to get even just having a truly dumbass moment, except…
Except he said he only started doing this last week, around the 14th. And I had the flu on the 1st. And, thinking now, I was only able to hear him doing it in the last week or so. But I don’t know how to tell him this, I don’t know how to tell anyone. And I think of my brother, towards the end of it all, when he was sat crouched outside my bedroom door whispering that he was sorry. Except, I’m wondering if he did mean it like that. His exact words were just that he didn’t want this to happen anymore it needed to stop.
And my boyfriend is still out trying buying every snack under the sun. I heard his car drive off.
And someone is behind the living room door.