Day Terrors

The first one found me when I was 4, just a few hours after my mother’s death. My aunt told me what it was, so I wouldn’t be scared when it followed me. I thought I would have to deal with it forever, but it was gone by the time the funeral came around.

I soon forgot about it, and my aunt didn’t bring it up again; the little girl with brown eyes and pale blond hair would only be an unnamed feature in my dreams, off in the sidelines until I woke up, and forgot again.

Seasons changed, got warmer or colder. Flowers faded on my mother’s grave until I found no use in replacing them anymore. I barely knew her. I was 13. My aunt grew old and dragged me along with her. She never had any children, and since I stopped acting like a child soon after, she didn’t need to learn how to be around me.

Acting older made me feel it, so when the second one showed up, I didn’t really know what to do with it. A boy my age stood on my aunt’s doorstep asking if I wanted to come out and play. Nobody had ever asked me that before.

By the time I made up my mind, mainly to humour him, he was gone.

In my dreams he had a name, but nothing much else. When I started seeing him around school, in the public pool or in shops, I wouldn’t try to get his attention. I got the feeling he knew when I could see him, however, but wasn’t making the effort to catch me either. It was a strange kind of coexistence, then he moved towns and I never said a word to him.

The first time I talked to one of them was the first week of college. In a haze of overstimulation, meeting a new person every hour and forgetting their name too soon, I must have met at least five. I don’t know how I could tell them apart, there was just something about their voices, like I had heard them before; the essence of a person without the matter or character. As quickly as they entered my life, they left it.

Maybe it was a kind of rite of passage, meeting a quota of unknowables. Whether it was for my benefit or their own would be the subject of an hour of meditation, yielding nothing. I was fine with it. Too fine.

I came home after college and visited my mother’s grave to see that someone else had left a bunch of flowers there. My aunt had moved away, and there was nobody else who knew her as well as me, and that was nothing to boast either. In my absence, I was glad to know someone out there cared for her as much as I should have. Guilt was a feeling I didn’t like to dwell on too long, like most things. Moving from place to place became a habit, and I soon started leaving behind the names and faces that I did get to know.

A truck full of boxes and state lines later, I had nobody once again, and I couldn’t have felt more at peace.

It was then that they started appearing more and more. Unexplained creaks on the wood floor like they were being walked on, or taps on the window, pebbles rolling down the gutter and forming piles at the mouth of the spout. I suspected birds, half-heartedly.

There were more signs.

A sandwich in a paper bag with my name on it in the office fridge, though I knew I’d left my lunch at home. The way my soap dispenser was never empty, or how I never had to oil the hinges of my garden gate. My shoelaces never came undone.

They had learned I didn’t want to see them, so they didn’t appear.

When my first child was born I decided it was time to figure things out for myself. It had been long enough living with this convenient bliss, and every invisible force wanted me to be a little happier than the last. But life had become too simple for me. I no longer wanted to be alone, and craved the menial discomforts that came withe every other life I encountered. In protecting me from life, they stopped me from living.

It became exhausting sitting by my daughter’s side, waiting for her to start crying. I wanted her to scream when she woke up, when she was hungry, or gassy, or simply feeling the terrifying ordeal of being alive for the first time, because I hadn’t felt it since I was 4, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her living that same way.

I reached out to my aunt at first, and she pretended not to remember telling me who they were when they first arrived. But she only said their name, and that they would be with me from now on. Now, older and wiser, I wanted them gone.

When I got off the phone, my house felt one degree colder, just off the perfect temperature I’d suffered in all these years. Stepping over the threshold with the shopping bags the next day, I tripped and dropped a carton full of eggs. My wife didn’t understand why I was crying, it was only eggs. I couldn’t explain how happy I was.

Then, I heard my daughter crying in the next room.

We visited my mother’s grave and left a bunch of flowers there for the first time in decades. It was a hot summer day, and the graveyard wasn’t as empty as I remembered it. Around the border of the rows of graves, nondescript spirits wandered hand in hand, or alone. A little girl with pale blond hair, a young boy holding a football, asking another to come and play in the adjacent park. People I’d seen once in my life, if they were only there to make meaningless conversation until a future friend appeared. One that would stick around.

All of them watched the flower be lowered as the sun warmed the headstones.