My neighbor and I were always on good terms. She’s a kindly old woman, with a leathery face always softened into a smile. The type that takes on the role of grandmother for anyone that comes within range. She lived alone in the apartment next to mine, accompanied only by a picturesque purebred ragdoll cat. I’ve never seen her actual family visit her, but she didn’t seem bothered by that. Instead, she took it upon herself to dote on all of us in the tiny apartment complex as if we were all her grandchildren.
It was a blessing she was so openly warm and friendly, because I had never been good at getting to know people. I’ve always been jittery and nervous, prone to irrational fears and anxious spirals. I’ve also never really been good at hiding my anxiety either, meaning that all those who meet me notice my twitchiness immediately.
Because of that, people often assume that I must be insane, and… well, admittedly, I won’t argue and say I don’t have a few screws loose, but I’m really not as bad as it seems. I see a therapist regularly, and he’s confident that my diagnosis begins and ends with PTSD and generalized anxiety. I may be prone to fears that push the boundaries of what’s realistic, but I’ve never been actively delusional.
Like, for example, one time I was locked out of my apartment. For the painstaking thirty minutes while I waited for the landlord to show up with a spare, my brain was assaulted with fears that I’d be attacked while I waited outside. I know, logically, that’s very unlikely, but the fear wouldn’t stop nagging at me anyways. Because while it’s unlikely, it’s technically possible.
The old woman came to my rescue then. She sat with me outside of my door, her cat on a perfect blue leash beside her, and it curled up on my lap while we talked to pass the time and take my mind off of things. She didn’t care that my fears were irrational. She listened without calling me crazy, and even supplied a few lighthearted jokes about slugs.
(Why slugs? Well, I don’t remember the jokes word-for-word, but it was something about how some of them can get really flat, thinner than paper, and how it’d be convenient if I could do the same. That way, I’d be able to slip under my door. There was a punchline in there somewhere, I think it was about how I’d have to be naked because my clothes wouldn’t fit, but I don’t remember it anymore. It was kind of a lame joke, but it made me laugh anyway.)
Really, she’s helped me a lot whenever my irrational fears get the best of me. Like, another time I tried to use one of those face scrubs with the microbeads inside, but I got one of them in my eye. I flushed it out with water, but I swore I could still feel it in there. I was terrified that somehow, it would slide behind my eye and get stuck there. I know there’s a gap between the eye and the skull, and I figured if something got stuck back there it’d cause an infection that could only be fixed by surgery, and might even make me lose my eye.
But my neighbor is smart. Wise, from her years of experience, but also book smart. When she caught me panickedly googling what happens when something gets stuck behind your eye, she told me that not even a microbead would be small enough to fit. She gave me the exact measurements of how small something would have to be, though I can’t remember it now, and sure enough it was much smaller than a microbead. Though my fears were often irrational, whenever something turned out to just not be possible, it helped a lot to calm me down.
My neighbor is a kind woman, and a good person. There’s only about a dozen of us living in this building, all from different walks of life and all consistently lonely people, and yet she is kind to us without a single question asked. She taught the recovering addict who lives above me how to bake sourdough bread. She helped the transgender woman downstairs learn to braid her hair for the first time. The single dad down the hall, the only person with a child in the building, is able to go to her whenever he needs help getting his tiny, sickly baby to calm down and sleep.
That’s why I can’t explain what happened today.
She invited me over for tea, as she often does. She taught me how to grow my own, actually. I have little garden pots hanging on my windowsill, flowering with different tea herbs. I never thought I’d be able to garden in this small studio apartment in a gloomy corner of a cold city, but she has a green thumb and a sharp mind and was able to figure it out for me.
Today, we brewed some mint tea, made from my own plant. My mint is basically my child at this point. I had to move it over to another windowsill because it got too big and was smothering the other plants. Any time I have a visitor (a rare occurrence, but it happens) I practically beg them to take some mint because there’s just so much mint. Thankfully, my neighbor is happy to take some off my hands and make it into a nice tea blend for us to enjoy.
Now, nobody who lives in this building has much to their name. It’s cheap housing, and while it’s not in the ‘bad’ part of the city necessarily, it’s close enough that sometimes you can hear the sounds of police sirens and gunshots over the traffic. Still, my neighbor makes an effort to make her living space nice on a budget. She’s an expert garage sale shopper, and has her house immaculately furnished with ornate antiques and floral prints. Nothing that would be worth much money, even if brought to a collector, but it was nice. She made her little apartment into a proper home.
I bring this up because despite how she decorates her home, she dresses and presents herself in a way that’s very ‘low-key’ and modest. She wears only the lightest dusting of makeup, doesn’t use any product to style her hair, and her wardrobe consists of simple patterns and light colors. Personally, I think she looks great (especially for her age; I’ve never asked how old she is, but I’d guess she’s positively ancient) but it’s clear that she’s not very focused on appearances.
So, I was surprised when her eyeliner started to run. Now, I wasn’t judging, this happens sometimes! I had a goth phase in high school, and every bowl of overcooked ramen I made myself would send steam into my face that would sometimes make my cheap, jet-black eyeliner drip down from my eyes. Our tea might not be as oppressively steamy as my past noodles, but it was still possible that the moisture could cause a bit of dripping.
It was weird, though, because I couldn’t see any eyeliner on her eyes, and that jet black didn’t seem like her style at all. It was just this one thick black glob hanging from the corner of her left eye. She didn’t notice it, either. She just kept talking and smiling as it slowly oozed down onto her cheek. She only seemed to become aware after it was obvious I was staring.
“Is something wrong?” She had asked, her lips pursed in concern.
I stammered a little, before pointing at my own eye. “Um… you have a little something right there,” I had said.
She touched it and gasped a little. “Oh my. I guess my new makeup doesn’t stick as well as I thought it would.” Then, she took out her handkerchief – covered in leafy patterns and little cat faces – and gently wiped it away.
But –
But that’s the problem.
I have good eyesight. I’m observant. I might be anxious and high-strung and not the brightest, but I know what I saw. I’m not delusional, I’ve never hallucinated, and even at my most nervous I still remain tethered to reality.
She turned her head away from me slightly to wipe the drop away, but I still saw it. I saw it squirm back into her eye like a worm, or an insect, or – or a slug. I saw the shape of it wriggling under her eyelid until it flattened itself, flatter than paper, and went behind her eye.
I saw it, I swear I saw it.
I made an excuse after that and cut our tea party short. Her reaction was hard to read. I think she might know that I saw it, and that’s even more terrifying. It’s not like I was exactly ‘playing it cool’ anyways, because I just needed to get out of there as soon as possible.
I haven’t left my apartment since then, but I know I’ll have to eventually. I’m almost out of sick days for work, and I can’t afford to lose this job. She has tried to check on me a few times, but I always mumble an excuse through the door about one thing or another to get her to leave.
I threw up after our tea party, and I swear, the vomit had black worms wriggling inside of it. I flushed it too quickly to be sure, and the light in my bathroom has never been the best, but I know what I saw.
I’m just… so confused and terrified, but I also can’t help but feel a bit heartbroken. I considered my neighbor to be my friend. She was so kind to all of us, and I hoped we could be a surrogate for the family that never visited her. I didn’t want to believe what I saw. What if nothing was wrong and I really was just losing my mind? God, I feel like I’m losing my mind.
I think I have to move out.