I saw it again. Worse (and I thought there could be nothing worse), I heard...shit. I'll get into that later. Work up to it.
Let's start with what I never thought would be the easier thing to write- I saw the monster again yesterday. I was asleep on my couch and I woke up and saw it rising over the top of the duplex across from mine. This is what the view from my window looks like:
except imagine that instead of a poorly-captured sunset (I took this photo early last semester), it's a clear, mid-afternoon sky and there is a thin, faceless monster leaning over that roof. Its legs must have been almost as tall as the building. And it was LOOKING AT ME.
I screamed and stared...I couldn't look away for several minutes. I don't think I even blinked. And it stared back. I was sobbing so hard I could barely breathe but I couldn't look away. I kept whispering, "no, no, no, no" over and over, trying to remember the words to a prayer, a satori, a song, but there was nothing, just...just that thing. It was so goddamn tall. It could have almost been ridiculous. Like a god walking across the world, like a bone-thin colossus. It looked over the roof of the duplex across the courtyard at me for five minutes and it seemed like an eternity. Broad fucking daylight, this monster, this impossible thing just looking over an entire house to peer into a window...
Finally it disappeared- just vanished. No theatrical effects, no jump scares, not even a noise or a weird feeling in the air. It was there and then it was gone. I had a panic attack, which was suddenly made immensely worse when I finally looked down and saw blood on my shirt- I screamed again, thought...I don't even know what I thought. As it turns out my nose had started bleeding sometime while I was staring at the monster, but I was so scared that I didn't notice. This is what my shirt looks like now:
Stupidly, I was relieved that it was just some junky shirt left over from when I was an RA rather than one I like. Weird what we focus on, isn't it?
I've kept to my room since then. I tried to go to class today but I can't...I can't keep my life together and focus on this thing too. It just doesn't work. Even now, my head is aching so bad I can barely look at the screen, but I have to get this down.
OK now the other thing...this is hard. I'm so scared to write it down, because as long as it's still in my head and no one knows about it but me, I can deny it. But the moment I hit the right keys and those black words appear on the white screen, I'm not going to be able to hide from this anymore.
This morning I got a call from my mom. We were just talking, me pretending to be normal and not paying much attention until she said something about finding a bunch of old drawings in the garage that I did when I was a little kid. They were drawings of my imaginary friend.
I don't remember having an imaginary friend.
I asked what the drawings looked like, and she told me that mostly it was me in the open, and my friend hiding behind things. She said I used to tell her he was shy. I apparently used to call him Mr. Moon. When she told me those little details...look, I'm not an idiot. I'm genre savvy enough to know what those pictures will show.
I was afraid to ask any more, but I asked her to mail me the pictures. I told her I thought they might be cute. And now I'm sitting here on my couch terrified not only of what happened yesterday but what happened when I was a kid...that fucking thing might have been near me before, might have tried...and I still don't remember at all. That's the worst of it. I have these blanks in my mind from when I was a kid, and I know something bad is in there. I don't know whether I should try and find out what happened, or to just let it stay buried...when Jill and I talked about repressed memories so many months ago, we talked about how difficult it is for people with repressed memories to access them. No, that's not quite the right word- not difficult to do, but difficult to deal with. We don't repress happy memories. Our minds cover things up for our own protection, and once we open that box, we have to deal with what comes out of it.
The question is, do I try and remember what I lost as a little kid playing behind her mom's house in the woods, or do I keep myself in the dark?
I'm scared of being in the dark. But I'm even more scared of what happens if I turn on the light. And I have the feeling that if I don't flip that switch, someone else will.
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