Visitors

There has always been a certain energy around me, it lingers— like a bad smell. A smell so foul that you cannot seem to think of anything else until you do forget about it, and you forget about it so hard and so quickly, you don't even know how you managed it.

The air was heavy like there was a constant fog around me, it made it difficult to breathe and would eventually give me a headache. It felt like my brain pounded my skull and if it pounded any harder it would split into a hundred different pieces, getting lodged into my skin, and I'd probably just cease to exist right there and then. There is no way they would be able to save me if my head literally exploded.

And even if they did, somehow by miracle manage to save me, I wouldn't really be saved, I'd be condemned to a life sentence of dependence and I would wish everyday for the rest of my life, if I could even manage to muster thoughts as a twenty something who exploded their own brain, that they would've just pulled the plug and helped somebody else when I was admitted to the hospital.

But that, luckily, never happened. At least not yet. And the fog was real, I couldn't see it, no, but the atmosphere around me felt like I'd lived next to a factory my entire life or if I was a forty-a-day type. The ones that smoke so much it's their brand and it's what they're known for. And stealing lighters, I suppose they're known for that too.

I looked in the mirror. Forgetting the energy was daily but after waking up you could sense it, probably even more so then the day before. Sometimes it didn't let you forget it. Sometimes it made you bare witness to possible insanity, it made you stare at nothing and feel absolutely everything. Every atom, every chemical element above you, beneath you, around you, every hair on your body at a point, every little tick in the walls. It made you hyper-visual, spiritual—even. Somewhere to blame the derangement, that would soon be how you were known.

People would look at you from across the street and thank whatever it was they believed in that they chose to walk on the right hand side and that you had chosen to walk on the left hand side.

I'd be the crazy cat lady, but worse. And the only people that would understand me were those who could communicate whatever it was around me. Those who read cards that the average person could not, not ones with a language scrawled across it but little pictures that didn't crown you king of poker. It didn't make you rich in materials but in knowledge. In the divinity that average people couldn't ever understand.

These were the type of people that managed to stay unmarried and childless— and if you ever did have the rare moment of meeting one who had wore a gown, they were widowed. It's just how it seemed to be. Those were the stereotypes.

And I desperately itched to be like them, it was tormenting that I understood enough to know who they were and what they were capable of yet not understand it to the point I could share the ability with them.

When I was nine, when I first felt whoever, whatever was around me, it started out with a phantom hand on my shoulder in my grandparents home.

I was no stranger to campfire stories which entailed ghosts and ghouls and monsters and so, although it made my whole body squirm I accepted that my grandparents ancient little bungalow by the seaside was haunted. That afternoon I even gave him, because I felt that it was a him, a whole personality— a campfire story of my own. He was a soul lost to the sea, swept up to the shores of Dover. Never to see his love again. The ship that was wrecked.

My imagination was to get me into trouble one day. I sat back and thought of the naive child I was, thinking it wasn't anything harmful, that it wouldn't follow me home, or to school, or to college, or to the office. That it would just leave me alone.