Content Warning: Mentions of mental illness and substance abuse, car accident, s*icide attempt.
***
There’s someone living inside my head and I don’t know who they are.
My earliest memory of them is when I was five years old. It was just an image briefly flashing in my head before I fell asleep. A dark, shrouded figure sitting in a chair, staring in my direction. The room they were sitting in was grimy and gloomy but with warm brown tones. Gives me the same vibes a Francis Bacon painting does.
I saw the figure every night until I turned ten. I thought it was normal to see the figure in the chair before falling asleep. I thought everyone saw them too.
But when I mentioned the figure to my best friend at the time, he just gave me a weird look and told me that he’s never seen this figure before. I realised then, that the figure in the chair only existed for me.
Maybe it’s because of this realisation, but from the age of ten, the figure stopped appearing every night. Whenever I tried to look for them in my head, there would be nothing there but this strange, dark pressure. I thought, maybe it’s finally gone. Maybe it was some kind of weird hallucination.
A few years passed without incident. I wrote the figure off as one of the many unexplainable childhood memories and quickly pushed it to the back of my mind.
Then, the accident happened. When I was thirteen, my mother fell asleep at the wheel of the car during a family road trip and drove off the road. The car rolled down the ridge, flipping three times, before landing upside down. I remember blacking out. The world flashing light and dark and light and dark again and the pain in my head as it slammed into the roof of the car with every flip.
I eventually came to, hanging upside down from my seat belt. Adrenaline rushing through my veins, I unclipped my belt, landed on the roof, managed to avoid most of the broken glass strewn everywhere, and crawled out of the window. I remember this in flashes, so I’m unsure how I managed to do all of this in my panicked state, but I supposed I was on auto-pilot the whole time.
My first instinct was to check on my little brother who was sitting in the back, and I ripped the barbed wire fence from the car with my bare hands so I could free him. Again, I inexplicably managed to escape injuring my hands. Everyone escaped major injury but my grandmother and mother were trapped in the driver and passenger seats. So we waited for the ambulances and fire trucks to arrive.
During the wait, I sat dazed beside the car, sitting in sheep shit and mud. Bruised head aching and feeling oddly detached from my own body. Every time I closed my eyes and distanced myself from the world, I could see the room. The dark, grimy room with the brown walls. But this time, the seat was empty. The window behind it, slightly ajar.
I could see more details. The corner of a table just out of frame, swollen wood with too many whorls that look like faces. A clock on the wall above the vacant chair, incomprehensible symbols in lieu of numbers - the kind a child might scribble before learning their 123s.
And just when the sound of distant sirens entered my periphery, I saw a subtle movement in the window: a dark figure, stooping down to peer inside, and a flash of white sclera. My heart leapt into my throat and I quickly opened my eyes. I was shaking, sweating, chilled to the bone in mid-summer heat.
Our eyes had almost met.
Chronic mental illness came for me after that. Depression, anxiety, panic attacks, flashbacks, new phobias. The whole carnival of lost innocence and existential dread. I started coping in unhealthy ways and acquainted myself with the dead hours of the night in my newfound insomnia. It’s a bit of a cycle. You can’t sleep because of rumination, but those long, lonely hours are fertile ground for unwanted thoughts. And very quickly did my rumination turn to visiting the figure in my head.
During this chaotic period, the figure would appear in different places around the room. They would be standing at the window, back turned to me as they ostensibly stared outside. Other times, they would be sitting at the table, and only their arm and leg could be seen on the edge of the frame. The worst times were when they were sitting in that chair, looking in my direction, because - while before their features were entirely obscured by shadow - I was now able to see a faint impression of a face.
It didn’t seem real. It was too cartoonish. Like a caricature of a human face. I didn’t like it. It made my skin crawl and my heart palpitate in anxiety. I never lingered long whenever they were sitting in the chair.
The major incident happened when I was seventeen. A high school senior, struggling with substance abuse problems and undiagnosed mental illnesses. And it was the first time I attempted suicide.
It was during a study retreat at our local college campus. We were put into vacant dorm rooms built in the ‘70s that were coffin-sized and draughty. The first night, I slept with the couch pushed against the door because it was missing a lock. I was paranoid that night, starting awake every time I fell asleep, and seeing a hallucinatory figure standing in the open doorway or hunched over my bed.
The second night, I was put into another room - this time a four person room I had to myself. But the largeness felt wrong to me. It was cold, empty, and hollow. The penny-thin windows stretched high in an arch, like those in a church, and I could only see the bright sunny sky outside. I skipped the day’s activities and lay in bed instead. Staring at the sky. It looked fake to me. Obnoxious. Insidious.
I decided to kill myself.
I swallowed an entire pack of painkillers and lay down to die. The sky went hazy. Disappeared. I felt sleepy and light headed, and I closed my eyes. Without my want or say, I slipped into the room inside my mind–
And there was a horrendous face inches away from my mind’s eye, twisted and contorted in immense, inhuman rage. Bloodshot eyes bulged out of their sockets; bared teeth gnashing, mouth stretched wide like the head was split open with an axe; and their flesh was bloodless, a Rorschach of sickly shades like mottled mould consuming a peeling wall. And though they appeared to be howling, there was not a single sound to be heard except my own pounding heart.
I screamed so loud I could taste blood and I wrenched myself out of my head. I opened my eyes, drenched in sweat, and vomited over the side of the bed. Most of the pills were undigested.
When I dared look inside my mind again, the figure was sitting calmly in the chair. Shrouded in shadow. Like nothing had happened at all.
Ever since that day, I’ve grown to fear the person living in my head. I do anything and everything in my power to avoid looking inside my own head, but it’s almost impossible not to.
I slip. I always slip.
I can see more of the room now. The table in its entirety. A door to the right of the room, leading to god knows where. An impression of a kitchen - I say impression, because it’s just two long box like shapes and a strange amalgamation of cookware and food, as though it were AI generated.
The figure lives there now. They live. They walk across the room. They stand in the faux-kitchen and move their hands, like they’re play-pretend cooking. They stand at the window, staring at something only they can see. Sometimes they stand outside the window and swing the top half of their body inside and swing back out again. They do this over and over and over. Maybe it’s a game to them. Lately, they’ve taken to standing beside the chair and motioning with their fingers, drawing shapes in the air.
I think the figure is trying to communicate with me.
I don’t want to know what they’re saying. I’m scared. Terrified. I don’t know why they are living in my head. Maybe they aren’t real. Maybe they’re just a hallucination. An imaginary friend gone too far. But they - and the room they live in - are firmly rooted in my mind as though they are a part of it.
And last night, something happened that I can’t explain. Something that puts all those theories down the shitter. Because when I visited the room in my mind, the figure was hunched before the door, jerkily swinging their hand back and forth. And with every swing, I could hear a quiet knock on my bedroom door.