Gibber

I used to not think of myself as a bad kid. I knew I had done bad things: I often got in trouble in school, I’d done various drugs, I’d even gotten in trouble with the law. Still, I respected the people who deserved my respect, and tolerated the people who didn’t. I tried to help people as often as I could, and did my best not to judge. I loved my mother, did my best to deal with my father, and treated my grandparents as if they were judges of the Supreme Court, whose words were final. These things, to me, were what made someone a “good person.”

Maybe I was more delusional then than I am now, or maybe I really just turned into a bad kid.

-

The first couple of days in the new house went surprisingly well. For some reason, moving the second time seemed more difficult and chaotic, but we worked together to get it done. We found places for all the pots and pans and appliances. We arranged furniture, hooked up the washer and dryer, and turned on things like the hot water, the cable, the phone, and other things we couldn’t live without.

At night, my sister would set up a little bed for herself on my floor. My sister and I occupied the only two rooms upstairs, and since it was too much of a hassle to run any cords up there, neither of us had cable. I, however, had a DVD player hooked up to my TV, and since my sister had no box spring for her bed (we couldn’t get it up the stairs) and no television to lull her to sleep, she slept with me.

Those first nights, with her sleeping on my floor, were easy. It was sort of like when I was younger, watching movie after movie until I fell asleep, but there was no fear. I could get up and go downstairs without fear that there was something hiding in the darkness. If I woke up in the middle of the night and my sleep timer had turned off my TV, I didn’t rush to turn it back on. The darkness seemed less like a solid object, and simply became the absence of light.

That was bound to change, of course. Eventually, my sister figured out that sleeping on the couch downstairs was more comfortable than both her mattress without a box spring and her makeshift bed on my floor. She could watch all the basic cable she wanted and fall asleep comfortably.

With that, everything began to retrograde. There is one small window in my bedroom, on the opposite side of the room. My bed is situated in a little nook, so that even with the window, very little natural light reaches me. Once my sister found a new place to sleep, I started noticing the way the darkness settled into the corners. Slowly, with each passing night, my fear began to return.

-

“So you don’t believe in ghosts?” Daniel asked me.

When it’s like this, my room is nice. Lit candles and the small window cast a dim light into the room, and incense burn to cover up the smell of smoke. With the sheets covering my bare skin, my boyfriend, Daniel, next to me, and the smell of weed mixing with Egyptian Musk, I don’t even think about what it’s like at night.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in ghosts,” I reply, “it’s just that I don’t believe that they’re human spirits, you know?”

I sat up, grabbing a pair of shorts off the floor. Standing in front of the mirror, I stared at my thighs, the way they stuck out on the sides and the way they mashed into each other in the middle. I watched as I slowly pulled the shorts on, the elastic band squeezing the fat all the way up until it settled uncomfortably at my waist.

It felt like my mind was finally hitting puberty, even though my body went through it years ago. Even in the worst of my pubescent years, I never paid much attention to my body – the way it filled a room, or seemed to disappear within it. I never noticed the way I sat and how it made my stomach look, or the horrible way my clothes seemed to fit, but it all suddenly became very clear to me.

“God, babe, you’re perfect,” Daniel said, sitting up.

He wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me toward him and into his arms as his hands slid along what he thought was perfection. This was no compliment to me, even though I knew he really meant it. I knew what kind of girls he found attractive, and that was not something I really wanted to be.

I could feel the smoke going to my head, though, and that was a comfortable feeling. Not in the sense that I was a major pothead and needed weed to function like a human being. There was just a comfort in knowing my mind could rest. I wouldn’t be mentally picking apart my body, but would be telling myself to accept it for it’s flawed beauty. I wouldn’t be scared of noises, or presences behind my back. Instead, I could justify those feelings as weed-induced paranoia. Instead of tossing and turning at night, I would lay down, burn out, and fall asleep within seconds.

And that’s what I did when Daniel left, but it didn’t last. Instead, I woke up that night to find the shadows.