My earliest memory of them is when I was five. It was an image, briefly flashing in my head before I fell asleep. A figure sitting in a chair, looking in my direction.
They were bald with mottled skin and groggy features; nothing distinct or unique. Like what a child might create if they were prompted to draw a ‘human’.
When I was in college, I went to a Francis Bacon exhibition and I instantly broke out into cold sweat. The figures in his paintings are eerily reminiscent of the figure in my head. Vague impressions. Shrouded in palpable pressure and noise and darkness.
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 an empty room and an empty chair. Sometimes, I’d glimpse a closet in the corner, cracked open and pitch black within.
Despite the empty room, I always had a distinct, visceral feeling of being watched. Like there was a pair of eyes, boring into my person. I never saw the figure itself. 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.
There was someone there. A good Samaritan, I think, who crawled into the car through the broken window. They never said anything. Never made a sound. And I couldn’t for the life of my remember their face. But they were skinny, almost emaciated, and their presence was like a deep, dark pressure against the back of my head.
They unclipped my belt and I landed on the roof of the car, dazed. And then I crawled after them, following their vague silhouette until I was free from the wreck. Their body cleared most of the broken glass away, so I was left relatively unscathed.
When I stood up and looked around, I was alone. And the immense relief and adrenaline coursing through my body had nothing to do with the accident.
Everyone escaped major injury but my mother and father were trapped in the front seats. So we waited for the ambulances and fire trucks to arrive.
During the wait, I sat dazed beside the car, sitting in muck; 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 sickly green-brown walls. 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 climb inside, and a flash of white sclera.
I quickly opened my eyes, shaking, sweating, chilled to the bone in mid-summer heat.
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 gazed at the suffocating blackness 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 hazy - 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. I never lingered long whenever they were sitting in the chair.
Another major incident happened when I was seventeen. I was 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 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 dark. It 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.
There was a face inches away from my mind’s eye. They were staring at me in pure, unadulterated hatred, their maddened, bulging eyes locked onto mine, and their rage-contorted features for the first time clear as day.
There was an immense pressure within my head and I could feel them screaming. But all I could hear was the frantic pounding of my heart.
I opened my eyes and vomited over the side of the bed. Most of the pills were undigested.
When I calmed down enough to brave a look inside my mind again, the figure was sitting calmly in the chair. Like nothing had happened at all.
I’m scared of the figure living in my head. I do anything and everything to avoid looking inside my own head, but it’s almost impossible not to. I slip. I always slip.
These days, I can see more of the room. The table in its entirety. A door to the right of the room, leading to god knows where. The closet in the corner, blacker than pitch whenever it’s cracked open. An impression of a kitchen - I say impression, because it’s just two boxy counters and a strange amalgamation of cookware and food, as though it were AI generated.
The figure lives there now. They live. They pace across the room with awkward, loping steps. They stand in the faux-kitchen and move their hands, like they’re play-pretend cooking.
One day, after a visit to my sister and her two year old, the figure started covering their face and dropping their hands, over and over and over again. A strange, lifeless rendition of peekaboo. I realised then, the figure can see into my world just as I can see into theirs.
Lately, they’ve taken to standing beside the chair, their lips moving slowly, deliberately. I don’t want to know what they’re saying. I don’t think I want to know. Maybe they aren’t real. Maybe the figure is a hallucination. An imaginary friend gone too far. But they - and the room they live in - are firmly rooted in my mind and there’s no way of ridding them.
And last night, something happened that I can’t quite explain.
It was late – around midnight, and I was in bed drifting off into sleep. As usual, I was pulled into the room in my mind and I saw the figure by the open door, frozen still like a statue, peering into the darkness outside. I wasn’t sure what it was staring at. But the figure did that a lot - watching nothing and everything for no rhyme or reason, so I didn’t think much of it. And really, I was just relieved that they weren’t, for once, looking at me.
I relaxed and slowly fell deeper into sleep. But just I was about to lose consciousness, I suddenly jolted awake. My eyes flew open. And - I swear to God - for a split second, I saw a face in the crack of my door, just staring at me.