Monsters
They come at night. They always have. I forgot that, or I lied well enough to be convincing.
Look how clean the floor is. Weeks of quiet. I called it peace. I called it healed. I said it out loud to friends, to myself, to a room of paid listeners.
Then a room.
Sweaty people everywhere whose laughter was louder than the fragmented music. And among them, faces I could draw blind, lit warm, wearing the mouths that once said everything and meant nothing.
My mind had filed them under finished. My body got the memo and dropped through the floor anyway. I stood there holding myself, holding a drink, a girl-shaped thing operating from a great distance.
I wobbled. I warped. I swore it was just the high making it look this bad.
It wasn't.
I kept trying to laugh, to enjoy, to be a person at a party. The thoughts wouldn't leave. Every room I had ever shared with them, stacked like transparencies over this one: the quiet nights with my closed eyes, confessions and confirmations, the phone face-up, the waiting, the girl who read scraps like scripture, kicking in my chest, begging to be picked.
The walk was fresh air, at least. Mouth dry, feet aching, heels in hand, a dirty road under my skin-thin soles. The night coming off me in layers.
Then sleep, and he was there.
Not as he was. As I had ordered him. He looks at me, finally, the way I rehearsed for years in the dark, and I say yes before he has finished asking. No questions. No dignity. I would have signed anything.
Dreams never ask if you still want it. They just put it in your mind.
I woke up mourning a person who never existed, in a body that swears he did.
The whole day since has been the loop. His face in the dream. His face the last time, the real one, turned over so often it has gone thin as paper. Every look I ruled meaningless, dragged back out and pinned to the board. What if I'd said. What if he'd meant. I thought I had buried them. I had only stopped digging, and dirt remembers.
They were never sleeping. That was the lie I liked best. They were waiting, patient as mold, and I mistook silence for absence.
I don't know what healing is. I thought it was a door. It might just be a room you keep walking back into.
Last night I forgot the way out.
It's getting dark again. They know.
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