Possessed

I.

I woke in the night from nothing, assumed it had to be something, and there it was. Between my pillow and the pitched roof of Neil’s room, a pair of ragged hands reached from the wall, hairy and dripping in blue-black candle wax. A good imagination, you could say, but my whole body saw it. My limbs froze to the bed, my heart a hot thrash. In my periphery: the rounded edges of an unframed mattress, blank walls, dresser coins and receipts. A room that could be anyone’s, dead-emptied of its own energy. I searched Neil’s cheeks for familiar pinpricks of red, but his face was cadaver pale, eyes holed. I’d gone to sleep in love. In the night, with his shorn soft head vacant beside me and the murderous grip above, I was alone with a stranger. 

I trusted my body, then. If I sensed something in my bones before I even thought it, the danger was real. I forced my dry eyes to stay open until the sun came up. 

I was nineteen. It was my first relationship. Neil, the first guy whose house I stayed at often enough to know the roommates and cupboards and neighbor’s cat. I loved Neil’s hands on my curves, his guttural groan as I taunted him. We were lust-bent, starving, giggling as we dragged each other into spare bedrooms at parties, brick alleys, the back seat of a car. I was living closer to the surface of my skin than I ever had, and I lapped it up.

Three months in, the pain started with a burning. Soon, it became sharper, the ripping of a raw scab. Sharp enough for tears to bud my eyes and my breath to catch. After, the skin throbbed for days, crosshatched with fissures. Sometimes, my body forced shut, but others, I pushed through. For him, sure, but I craved pleasure, too. I needed to lose my head. Why trust my body’s nagging, when it was cautioning me against what I wanted most? If I made it through the beginning, to him deep inside of me, I could stay there, gasping and dense. 

The first doctor I saw ordered me the same yeast infection medication for six months, confident that it’d work, eventually. Neil bought me lingerie, a well-intentioned consolation prize. The panic worsened. Even if I was the one to take my clothes off, my body would rush ahead of my brain. A hidden switch would flip and suddenly, I’d be shaking and shoving Neil away. 

A second gynecologist sat me down and said let’s try a different pill, but also, what about sexual trauma? Perhaps when very young? Why not ask your mother, she suggested casually. I flashed hot with sweat, all my limbs suddenly weak. Sometimes bodies have better memories than brains, she said, before gesturing to my folded pants and loose socks on the chair.

My mother was adamant that no, she knew of nothing. Soon after, a naturopath at my college health center diagnosed me with BV. For the first time in over a year, the tears like tiny papercuts healed. The terror, though, remained. Intimacy was a forest at night. However hard I tried to relax, the sharp edges of pain-backed fear pressed, collapsing me when touched. The air between Neil and I was charged with shame, and its nasty flipside, resentment. 

Sometimes, our love was still good. In late spring, year two, we visited Neil’s mother. She lived at the base of a mountain thirty miles from my hometown. At dusk, Neil took grainy photos of me wading through clear creek water. We kissed with his mom’s sheepdog at the end of the guest bed and instead of suggesting more, Neil talked about his anger towards his estranged father, his fear of ending up similarly closed-off and bland. He cried in the space where I usually cried and I held him. I felt calm watching his blue-white eyelids begin to twitch. 

Still, I couldn’t sleep. The porch light shone through a break in the curtains, and the endurance of my pains weighed on me with familiar questions—what if we’d had sex tonight and I’d kept it together? Would some portal of connection have opened? Wide awake, I remembered that I’d been to this town once before, with my high school friend Lyle, who also fumbled for connection. 

I’d been driving, Lyle directing our turns. We likely passed this house and wove onto backroads that sent my heart into my throat. Sensing my fear, Lyle pointed us deeper into the woods, tires bouncing in the dirt. I drove until we turned a corner and my headlights lit a tall metal rack with a hook for hanging meat, and we were reminded of flesh and death and men who kill, and I lurched the car around. Of course there is nothing alarming about butchering livestock in narrow agricultural valleys, but fear is fun when invented.

Lyle was the kind of friend who folds you into himself at breakneck speed. When he showed up senior year, he rushed us past the seventeen years we’d lived apart. He despised his aunt with whom he was made by the state to live, so he brought his things to my house, but never quite lived there. Instead, he’d hang out with other girls who also had his comic books and favorite shirts in their rooms, then call from the middle of town at one a.m., sobbing. If you care about me, you won’t leave me to sleep in this parking lot; if you love me, you’ll get here and let me drive your car home; if you love me, you’ll fake a cackle as I snake into the opposite lane.

One night, in the opposite lane, we crested a hill and a car appeared directly in front of us, headlights to headlights, blaring. I shut my eyes. Lyle veered right. I screamed. He laughed. Then the car continued smoothly on the open road. He poked at the quick tears lining my eyes, put two fingers to my battering pulse and turned the radio up. 

Until I left for college, I stayed curled within our bond. It was more comfortable to be so close to someone I could barely breathe, than to wonder if anyone could really know me. I settled, rockily, into life at a liberal arts school four hours away. Lyle called often. When I shared that I hated it there, he asked why I didn’t drop out and come home. After he begged to move into my shared dorm room, claiming I was selfish and he had no one else, I stopped picking up. 

Two weeks before winter break, I had my first panic attack, then second and third. My skin crawled and my chest seized. My nails dug into my hands. I thought it was school stress—I was flailing academically, a public school kid thrown into banter about Plato and Socrates. But what came out when I made a single appointment with the campus therapist was all about Lyle. 

I didn’t have to see him, she said. I could chisel his control right out of my life, like a bruise from an apple. 

I never saw him one-on-one again. He didn’t ask why. I think he knew. 

The move from body knowledge to realization to solution was straightforward: panic neatly disappeared by diagnosis and action. Intuition heeded, problem solved. Life rarely offers such direct routes away from hurt, but awake in Neil’s mom’s warm house, staring at the constellation of acne scars on his upper back, I wondered why not. What was wrong with me? 

Three years in, combination shame-resentment still lived between Neil and I like sticky glitter from a bad night out, but we got used to it—sometimes sex worked and sometimes I caved in tears, so we got up and did something else. One weekend, we’d silently hate each other across a gathering of friends we adored; the next, we’d take molly and hold each other’s faces and let love beat full at the sunny cores of us. Mostly, our relationship was severely just fine. 

In late May, my housemates threw a party. Neil and I were laying drunk in bed, voices still pinballing in the backyard, dance music filtering in. Neil fell asleep. Then his phone lit up. A name I didn’t recognize wrote, I loved watching the sunrise with you. 

Immediately, I knew. He’d gone to a music festival the weekend before while I was at my grandmother’s 80th birthday. All week since, he’d been pissy with me. Earlier that night, when I’d lost a board game, he’d admonished me in front of my friends, then stormed out for a walk. I fantasized about smashing his phone against the wall. Instead, I tried to push him off my bed. He was too heavy. I slept tight in the crack by the wall. 

In the morning, I asked about the text. Neil said he’d befriended a girl he met at the festival. That’s it. His face was hard, unbreaking, his eyebrows raised at the ridiculous nature of my paranoia. My stomach turned, but I nodded. I would try to trust him. 

That week, his stormy mood continued. When I’d ask what was wrong, he’d look at me like I was crazy. He kept this up until my friend’s moralistic boyfriend, whose rigid values I appreciated in this moment, punched Neil in the face at a party. He’d also been at the festival and knew exactly what had happened.

We broke up. I grieved for a few months, then felt fine. About losing him. The week I spent being fooled, though, festered in me. I should have heeded my suspicions, my gut fears, over his word. At the time, this seemed a harmless lesson to carry.  

II. 

Six years later, I met Sasha. I didn’t think I was closed, but she opened me in ways others hadn’t. My sex pains had mostly ceased after Neil, and my intimacy with Sasha was slippery and fresh. We fell into dizzying obsession. One day, she covered her face with a pillow and asked why I filled every silence with I love you or you’re beautiful. It made her uncomfortable. I’d evaluate her response, too, she said. I never let our lust rest.

She was right. I was often treading water, terrified of losing her. This new, desperate part of myself scared and ashamed me. Directed outward, my anxiety had a grim edge of control. I didn’t think of Neil.

Sasha thought space might help. With more time apart, I fell back into myself. I listened to music on the bus ride to my receptionist job, happy to be alone and moving with others across the city. I texted Sasha selfies, my head resting against the cool window, never counting the minutes it took her to reply. 

After a year of dating, though, I moved 398 miles across California for graduate school and the demons Neil had gifted me flashed to life. Their fanged mouths watered at the hint that I was comfortably in love, a safe love in which I could express my whole self. Every moment apart, they screamed, was a moment for Sasha to slip away. When I tried to relax after a day of school, they gripped my throat with the dense choke of loneliness. When she seemed distant on the phone, they leapt and snarled, leeching terrible insecurity and the message that birthed them: trust your fear, it’s telling you something! Consider how many thoughts she has that you don’t know! They delighted when I openly grasped for reassurance from Sasha, when I turned into a twisted version of myself, fixated on never being fooled again.

Long distance’s whiplash between stark isolation and extreme togetherness made our weekends fraught as well. Spring break of my first year, while camping in the desert, we went on a walk up a rocky canyon whose creekbed center waved with grasses and thin trees. Trying to bar anxiety’s approach, I sang praises for the bouldered landscape, the creature-like cacti, the coming sunset. Overwhelmed by my chatter, Sasha withdrew. She walked beside me, but I felt she was a ghost. My words hung in dry air. I imagined her brain buzzing with secrets, with unvoiced criticisms of me, of our relationship. I asked if everything was okay once, and when she said yes, I tried to be quiet, too. To swallow my paranoia felt like a victory against the demons, but they continued to writhe, furious, waiting, knitting my neck and back lock-tight.

Days later, Sasha admitted that a lot had been wrong. Her new antidepressants were blanking her brain, fading her interest in everything, including me. She, too, felt she was barely there. Intuition, right again! the demons screamed, thrilled. But where did that get us? 

They tried another route: even if it’s not her fault, how could she stand to be so far away, when I needed her? No, I shot back, steadying myself, Sasha was as close as she could get, trying to speak to me through her fog. It took everything in me to listen to her over them. 

Late nights and slow afternoons back at school, I tried to sit with my feelings, to simply observe my gulping insecurity. How curious, her open interest in her new neighbor and their uglyhot shag haircut. Just a fact of life, Sasha forgetting to tell me she was visiting friends who lived in a hilly, reception-less pocket of the city, unreachable overnight. I love you, she’d say. Why don’t you trust me? 

I tried my best to melt any stories I’d weave around these non-betrayals, but my body resisted holding intense emotion. My back pain worsened and I developed terrible spasms in my ribs, that, on occasion, ripped into my stomach and blurred my sight. I’d sit upright in a chair in the dark, sometimes all night, because I could not sleep or lie in bed. 

This time, I could trace the roots of my pain—from Sasha to Neil to a raw fear of abandonment. Textbook. Knowing, however, changed nothing. Again, my body raced ahead of my mind, turning my partner into pain.

In September, Sasha and I went on a night hike up a hill by the ocean. My back was stable and it was an occasion: a full moon and a lunar eclipse and a blood moon, at once. We timed our hike wrong and parked as the moon slid into the earth’s shadow. We moved through total darkness. My phone’s flashlight was only bright enough to illuminate how many hidden corners and glistening webs crossed the path ahead. I walked in a cold flush, my shoulder blades pinched, wanting to run back to the car. Instead, I bravely envisioned our brutal end. I sent well wishes to the homicidal clan that lives in these trees, waiting for rare astrological events to taste blood.

Then we were at the top. The moon re-emerged, a slow beauty. My fear of the dark was gone and the demons, which often followed me into slow moments with Sasha, were nowhere. We were silent together, her brain in her head, untouchable, and mine, holding itself. Two people in love under a moon whose light had shifted for an hour, but now shined bright and whole. 

On our way back down, the bushes were awash with moon-white light like a stretch of snow. Tired and in awe, we drove to a glowing Taco Bell across Highway 1 from the Pacific. Sasha had to pee, so went to order inside. She took her keys, then ran quickly back and twisted them in the ignition to keep warm air blowing on my bare knees and face.

I slipped off my sneakers, put my feet on the dash and watched a man set his gas tank to fill. He stepped to the side, rolling his neck, leaning into a tight place until he grimaced. Farther off, a woman stood with her grip around the handle while her whole tank filled. Hunched, she didn’t let go. Maybe she feared the spigot slipping, gas sputtering over her feet, a spark lighting up this corner like a Bond movie explosion, killing us all. 

A friend recently told me that, unlike in action or thriller films, there are no heroes in horror. There are no solved mysteries and the hauntings rarely end. The sun may rise and the exhausted, bloodied protagonist may feel finally alone in her home, evil spirits departed, but it is assumed they will return. Because the horror of having a body with its own secrets will never go away. Nor will that of loving someone with a wholly separate mind from your own, of being possessed by old demons that make you want to possess—a train of fears, marching past your window, hoping you look out so their menace is burned into your brain forever. And forever, fear will mask as intuition. 

Across the highway a thin bank of fog, colored bright with polluted glow, hovered high over the black waves. It is so rarely dark in the city. Sasha climbed back into the car and leaned across the divider. She placed the warm paper bag of burritos in my lap, then pressed her lips against mine. We were looking at each other’s faces so closely, we could only see eye and cheek. It is always so easy to say, in the slowest, safest moments, what was I even afraid of?