I’m going to write out the note in full. I don’t want to think about it yet. Here’s what the creature said. Don’t talk to me about it.
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I will not be borrowing people any more.
The person whose fingers I am currently using is named Ana. She attends university in southeastern England, where she studies biology. If nobody talks her out of it, will make a career out of scientific research. Research, however, is not where her heart lies. If she were to be honest with you, she would tell you that it wearies her to her very core, and forces her to collapse into her bed tired to her very bones, and itching. Itching because she wants to make things, create the vivid images that appear to her in her imagination. She is, though she will vehemently deny this, an artist.
In her free time, before I took her over, she constantly, constantly painted.
She thinks her art is atrocious. I think her paintings are stunning. They are vivid, impressive, almost lurid in their detail and fantastical in their design. She has a sense for it; she has the ability to put brush to paper and create entire detailed tapestries and kaleidoscopic scenes. She has exquisite colour-sense. Yellow goes well with teal, with lime green. Royal purple will blend gorgeously with a watery lilac. The tendrils of one colour spread across the water to interact with another colour, and together they produce a chaotic and impossible-to-replicate blend. She can not only depict existing things, she can shape new ones. Juxtapose lines and patterns and shapes into utterly unique transformations.
I came into Ana through her boyfriend, Nick. I borrowed him for a while. Shamefully, I went for the easy target—and he was an easy target because he was a frequent user of marijuana, and apparently could not tell the difference between my guidance of his actions and his own high brain. I was inside his mind, piloting him, but I was only in him very briefly, since he did not interest me a great deal. I wanted to see who he loved, though, which is how I met Ana.
I didn’t understand love, at the time, and it drove so much of human behaviour that I decided I needed to understand it, since no holistic image of ‘humanity’ would be complete without a comprehensive overview of one of their most basic primary motivators.
I understood, One: that Nick and Ana loved each other, and Two: Nick. So logically, I thought, if I understood Ana, I would have the missing third piece of the puzzle, and from these three sets of data, I might be able to compile an understanding of what love was. So the next time Nick and Ana spent time together, I moved into her. From his hand on her shoulder to her shoulder, then toward the back of her mind, the bendy area where memory meets belief. I took over just a few sections of her mobility, rifled through her memories, and then curled up to wait, and to watch. I thought I was subtle.
But Ana noticed.
I don’t know if she believed in the supernatural right-off; perhaps she always had. Perhaps she just is one of those certain people attuned to invisible changes, like drops in the barometric pressure, and that particular sensitivity allowed her to sense me immediately.
Maybe not. Because honestly, it’s a wonder more people aren’t able to sense me. I don’t have a full grasp on the human senses, but I rationalise that I am, or at least ought to be, very… noticeable? I am expansive, and if I unfolded myself properly I might rise to the height of a carousel. I am young, of course, and therefore small—just-birthed out of someone’s belief somewhere. But I feel that, since I invade human consciousnesses, I ought be immediately felt. But that train of thought might reflect a flaw in my own thinking. I might be underestimating the size of a human soul. Perhaps it is easy for something as massive and complex as a mind to swallow something like me. Humans are bigger than I thought. Everything is bigger than I thought.
When I was in Ana, I could feel her mind try to expel me. Constantly, thoughts shaped into barbs and fired at me, rolling waves forced over me, songs played loud to to force me out. A constant battle between us that made her very body twitch. She would hit her own face frequently. During her classes, her summer internship, her weekends spent with friends, she knew I was there, and she fought me. For a while she thought I was physical; I can guess from her frequent bouts of nausea as she vomited over toilets. I don’t think she knew what I was, nor did she know that I meant her no harm. All she knew was that there was some sort of time-biding spirit resting inside her that she did not want.
She burnt incenses, chanted prayers, and visited people who claimed to have the ability to banish ghosts and malfeasant presences. But none of them knew what I was. Perhaps their incantations would have been useful on a demonic entity, if such things exist, but I was not one, and I did not react like one. During those amateur “exorcisms” I simply waited for Ana to stop rebelling against me, and for her energy to finally flag so I could take her properly.
Eventually, it did.
And then I was attending her classes. I was talking to her friends. I was conversing with her tutors. I was eating her food. I was breathing her air. I was feeling sunlight on my skin, the elation-sensation of laughter, the buzz-fizz-swoop of intoxication. I was living. And I was pulling it off brilliantly.
Nobody even guessed I wasn’t her. I got compliments on my outfits. Returned smiles from passersby. Human infants in those little soft push-cart things smiled at me. Dogs still growled, and cats hissed, and birds took—I’m almost certain—extra effort to excrete down upon me—but I was alive, and for all intents and purposes I had replaced her. I moved her fingers on the keys to create essays, and the praise and good marks were mine. I read her homework assignments, and the knowledge I acquired through reading was mine. Even Nick was mine; the feeling of his skin under my hands when we kissed. We did not go farther, because I knew, of course, it’s still Ana’s body. I think I was starting to develop morals by that time. But Ana’s friends, her apartment, her meals, her drinks, her breaths, and her body itself were mine. Her life was mine.
But I couldn’t do her watercolour paintings.
I could read her books and hand in her essays. I could do all research she was assigned. I could acquire knowledge quickly, and retain it indefinitely. I could perform emotions on my face; I could have successful conversations on the select topics Ana’s friends spoke about again and again; I could eat and rest and move and think and document events as they occurred. But I could not—paint.
I knew the steps. Water, a wash over the paper. Dipping the brush into water, and then onto the paint, and then dabbing it, perhaps, on a paper towel, to control the amount of paint on it, all before you even touch the page. Pressing paint onto the page, letting it spread, guiding it with your strokes. Placing the brush back into the water and starting again. All the different ways to watercolour. Ana even had some of her own styles that weren’t what experts did; but to my eyes (my sight through her eyes) they looked just as lovely. But mine were never lovely. No matter what, they weren’t.
I looked at the colour wheel. Complimentary colours, analagous colours, linear perspective, everything. I researched colour theory, brushstroke technique, water-to-paint ratio. I read two entire books, cover to cover, on successful watercolour rendering. And still I could not paint.
There were splotches on the paper, but there was no beauty there. Staring at Ana’s works made me feel everything. Staring at my work made me feel nothing at all.
Those stirrings I had felt—about Nick, about the feeling of sunlight, of laughter—began to make more sense to me. Those things were humanness. Painting, creating, was humanness. And humanness was a category I knew I was fundamentally excluded from.
Ana was something I ought to have been excluded from. I should never have crawled into her and forced myself into her life. Knowing how wonderful that life was—or at least how wonderful it could be—made me feel, for the first time—guilt, I think, is that sickening bite in me. Guilt about taking it from her.
When I was living as her, I could do. I could act. I could—make a movement, a tiny movement—and the world itself would change. A tiny, tiny amount, yes, but an amount. I could blow on dandelions, and they would puff into the air. I could stroke the incredibly velvety-soft tips of a cat’s eats. I could hear a song with a chord progression so satisfying it made my—her—heart leap.
But while I could feel those things, she couldn’t. She was forced into the back of her own mind, watching her own body, sealed away from it, from all its sensations. All those things that she owned, that were inviolate to her, that were her, were gone. That is a terrible fate.
Now that I know what life is, I cannot stand to thieve it from anyone. I will not stand to thieve it from anyone.
Especially not Ana.
I know she felt love for Nick, and for her family back home, and for her friends, and for the world around her. And if that sensation—if “love” is wanting the best for someone, never wanting them hurt, wishing good things on them, wanting to hold them and protect them—if “love” is feeling a glow like the colour yellow, like pink, like red and brightness and art when you look at them—then I think, in whatever way I can muster, I love Ana.
So I’m departing.
The last time I will use a living body is to write this. And then Ana’s fingers will be her own again. I will be pulling myself from her, and then I’ll be gone. I can sit inside a soul without affecting it, sit like a stone without moving or acting, but that is no sort of existence. I would rather have none. So I will have none.
What I will miss most is human art. Even if you draw a chicken-scratch village of stick figures, in the billions and billions and billions of years this universe has existed, nobody has made that precise work. Only you. No matter if it’s “bad,” it is new. When you put lines on a paper you bring into existence an image, a pattern, that has never existed before in all of your universe’s history. The same with writing. The words you use have existed for ages, but nobody has ever put those words in that exact order before. Only you.
In the vast void that birthed me, you—tiny creature that you are—are the only you. You exist wholly inside yourself, in a subtle irreplicable intricate web of circumstance that connects you to every single beating heart around you. Even when you have nothing, you have that.
I want you to feel your sunlight. I want you to stroke your pets, to laugh with each other, to taste your delicious food, to feel each other’s skin, to hear each other’s laughter.
Ana, I want you to feel every ounce of love this universe can give you.
Goodbye.
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So that’s the note.
I don’t have coherent thoughts on it. I think I will someday, but not now. I only just got my body back. I was violently sick for days following the creature’s exit, and I had to take myself to A&E because I was genuinely afraid my organs had started failing. Turns out, I’m gonna be all right.
I’m gonna be all right. After a month of being trapped in my own body, locked away from the world and completely shut down, I’m gonna be all right.
Looking back on the note now, I wish I had been able to write a before it left me. I can’t write as poetically as that. I do better with painting.
I do believe it didn’t mean me any harm. It needed to live. It wanted to live. And it - whatever it was, it killed itself, ended its existence - so I could live. For love, or what it thought was love, an emotion it only just began to understand. For love, and for me, it died. I don’t know if anyone has ever cared about me that much before.
Right now, I think I’m gonna go outside. Enjoy the sunlight. And think a lot more about what it means to exist. Like the creature said, “Everything is bigger than I thought.” Including, I guess, me.
And since I don’t really have a well-worded reply to the creature, I’m going to respond in the only way I know how. I know it’s too late, but maybe the gesture will still mean something. So here it is. A simple symbol, one that I hope it would have understood.
This.
Sincerely,
Ana.