I really love my boyfriend, trust me, I do. But lately he’s been acting very strange and it’s getting harder and harder for me to ignore.
We first met in July of last year on my birthday. My friends and I were walking home from a girls night out and were stumbling down the street after one too many martinis. As if from thin air, I noticed an intensely focused guy running towards me at full speed, and before I knew it, the pavement was uprooted from under me and I fell on my back. He apologised immediately, claiming that he didn’t see me at all and worrying about whether I was hurt.
I had sobered up completely and as silly as it sounds, I was starstruck by him. He was so beautiful and caring to the point where my heart melted instantly, even though all my friends gave me the ‘be serious right now’ look the moment I had hearts in my eyes. They were all irritated by the fact that this random guy knocks me to the floor as if he didn’t even see me and then starts to say sorry. Many of them have mentioned that they believe that he did it on purpose but I don’t know if I’m too infatuated with him to see this.
He offered to buy me coffee the next day to say sorry and gave me a small smile, so I gave him my number before he ran off. The next day, we had the best time: we had so much in common from music taste, to movies and humour so I was so surprised when he didn’t call me for a week. I had started to spiral over a guy that I barely knew and I know it sounds insane but I couldn’t eat or sleep for the entire week.
I have to admit that I do have an eating problem but it’s not so much about restrictive eating or anything like that- I just can’t look at food when I eat. Ever since I was a young girl, I’m not sure if I have had some suppressed trauma or anything but I hated looking at food while chewing it. I hated the texture of literally everything, even my favourite foods. The moment I opened my eyes while chewing, I would hurl immediately.
This is where things start to get really fucked up. I didn’t have the best relationship with my mother growing up due to her schizophrenia (which is of course not her fault) but she wasn’t very patient with me. She figured that the only way I would see that the food I was eating was a privilege and not disgusting was to sneak raw meat onto my plate while I was blindfolded to show me what truly gut wrenching textures felt like.
This threw off my entire system of maintaining a healthy weight by eating whatever I wanted while blindfolded as I fell extremely ill for months due to salmonella. I was 10 at the time and felt so betrayed by my mother and couldn’t trust her to feed me so I had to keep my eyes open for the next 2 years of my life while eating, but this only caused more problems as I would vomit at least once after every meal.
This links to my current situation, I promise, just bear with me. After that week, I was taking a walk around my neighbourhood to clear my mind, when I saw him talking to some guy on the side of the road. I was enraged. I thought to myself: ‘How could this guy just cut me off completely after we had such a great time and after assuring me that he would call?’
Clearly, he was too busy loitering the streets to give me the time of day, so I marched right up to him and said ‘Oh, you’re really booked up these days’. He seemed humiliated, not that I had called him out, but moreso that I had run into him, which pissed me off even more because I assumed that he thought he could get away with this and that he probably did this to loads of girls, like my friend mentioned.
He ran after me and mentioned that he was actually just finishing up with an AA meeting and was talking to his mentor before I ran into him. I felt terrible. I could tell that he was telling the truth when he explained that he had only been sober for a month and he was going on a run the night that we met because he was trying to find ways to distract himself from his cravings. Thinking back, I did note that he seemed distraught so it all added up in my head. He also explained that me being drunk the night that we met was probably not conducive to recovery so he was just taking some time away from his phone and trying not to get too involved with me but stated that it was probably too late for that since he already had feelings for me and wanted to ask me out to dinner.
I was so conflicted. As much as my heart was melting, I hadn’t been to a restaurant since I was 5 and didn’t know how to explain the situation. Instead I invited him for coffee at my apartment and poured my heart out about my condition and told him it was okay if he thought I was a freak.
He was nothing but kind and we decided to work on our problems together. I went to AA meetings with him, and he let me close my eyes while I ate, without judgement.
After a while though, I noticed something was off. Since I spend a lot of time with my eyes closed, my sixth sense has become heavily developed. Recently, I can’t hear him eating while we sit down to eat. I can feel his breath on my skin and don’t ask me how I know, but I feel like he is millimetres away from my face, staring at me wide eyed while I eat, smiling.
The first time this happened, I reluctantly put my hands out and to my horror, he was right where I thought he was. I laughed nervously and told him to stop, to which he laughed and said that he was just joking around before playing it off by kissing me on the cheek.
For the past 2 weeks, he’s been coming home late and smells really strange, not like alcohol but more like rotting, so he runs to the shower immediately before I can ask. To be honest I’m too afraid to ask anyway. I’ve been noticing this smell permeating our walls and garage floor of our apartment but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Since he was quite distant, he offered to cook me a meal last night but I really couldn’t stomach it. At first, I thought it was the seasoning or something but I hated the taste. I felt like he was staring at me again too, and what’s worse, I have no idea what type of meat that was. It just tasted… off.
Investigating this probably wasn’t the best idea, as I am now terrified every waking moment of my life, but I had to because I need to know who the man I had invited into my home is. I went to speak to one of the security guards about the smell and asked if anyone had noticed anything strange about their apartments but he seemed dumbfounded and told me nothing out of the ordinary is going on. He did say that if there was a dead squirrel in a vent or something, it would be easy to find out by pushing the grill of the vent on the ground floor- which made sense at the time as I live just above the vent itself- and that if there was anything there, he would sort it out.
So I did just that. I went down to the ground floor, which has always made me feel uneasy because it literally looks like a liminal space and I can never get any phone signal there. As I stepped out of the elevator, my phone buzzed, which was strange since my phone read ‘No Signal’. It was from my boyfriend:
‘Where are you?’
My heart dropped.
It was only 3pm and I knew he would be at work, so there would be no reason for him to have tabs on my location. I was going to lie but I realised that I could have been dealing with someone much more dangerous than expected and didn’t want to risk my life more than I already have, but that didn’t mean I had to tell the whole truth.
‘I’m just on ground floor doing the bins, why? You okay? <3’
My phone lit up as if on cue:
‘You’re going to check the vents aren’t you?’
What the fuck? None of this made any sense and now I was all alone in a dark car park-like space with some creep messaging me. I then got another text from an unknown number:
‘Please open the vent. Help. I need to get out before it gets to me. I don’t have much time baby, please.’
WHAT THE FUCK?
I knew it was my boyfriend. I just did.
But if that was my boyfriend, then who the fuck was in bed with me every night?
I know it’s silly to have unwavering faith like that, just from a text but I had to do something. I pushed the grill open slightly but wretched and fell to my knees at the intolerable odour. It smelled like a butcher’s shop that had been abandoned for years. But then something caught my eye. In my peripheral vision, I saw the glint of a diamond.
I would recognise that diamond anywhere.
My phone buzzed again:
‘Say hello to your mother for me.’
I felt like someone threw a bag of bricks at me. All the breath left my lungs and I couldn’t see anything. I hurled and gasped when I saw a severed hand fall from the vent and onto my lap. I let out a blood curdling scream but quickly covered my mouth when I heard a shout from inside the vent.
‘OPEN THE FUCKING VENT!’
I had to ignore the screams to steady my mind because I wasn’t ready to face whatever else I was about to see. I could hear the elevator rumble and hum- I knew he or it or whatever was after me but I felt so weak and sick, I could barely breathe. Whatever it was, I knew it was going to eat me and my boyfriend, if I could even trust my instincts that he was the one in the vent.
I could hear a voice behind me but couldn’t really understand what it was saying as I drifted in and out of consciousness.
Now, I’m awake but I’m definitely alone. There’s no one in the vent and no one behind me.
I’m not sure if I’m safe but I have pieced something together about that strange meal the other day.
Only my mother’s hand was left of her body.