Katie Gurel, "Phoenix: One That Rises from the Ashes"  

~~~

I never saw them during the day. Only at night, when the sun left my bedroom void from the light of day, would the figures appear.

Two eyes blinked into manifestation from the depth of the closet, followed by a grin that stretched and stretched. The grin reached for the eyes, pulling endlessly on the unseen muscles. While the eyes stared, latching onto my form, the body pried itself away from the closet to hover over my bed. The figure had no visible limbs. Just a straight body with hunched shoulders and a head that jutted out. He didn’t touch me, only hovered, but it was enough for sleep to evade me. I felt his eyes on my back as I tried to drown myself in the bedsheets.

The figures rarely appeared twice, but this one—the one I called the Shadow Man—did. He opened the door of my boyfriend’s room to smile at us. While my boyfriend slept, I tried to bury my face into his neck. Tried to ignore the fluttering shadows of small, avian creatures that danced along my boyfriend’s bookcases. 

Besides the man and the birds, there was the girl with long hair who appeared while I was alone. She looked like she crawled her way out of a Korean horror movie with long, black hair that reached down to her waist and hid her face. I lay in bed, hearing my heart thunder in my ears. I wondered if the girl was me. Me from a distant past. Why are you here? What do you want? Questions I didn’t voice, my fear paralyzing me.

The twins were different. Most of the figures appeared as I tried to drift off to sleep. But I saw the twins when I woke up at six am. Squished into my boyfriend’s single bed, I spotted the one robot in his room, with three by three rows of circular shining eyes and a mouth that gaped open. The more I stared at it, trying to make out its shape, the more its definition eluded me. Until finally it moved, revealing the twin behind it. I rolled around and snuggled into my boyfriend’s back, trying to choke myself on the scent of him, all laundry detergent and soap, to escape the figures behind me.

I only told my boyfriend about the figures at first. He hugged me when I told him. Held me in his arms as shadowy bugs, the size of my hands, writhed on the ground beneath us. 

When I finally told a psychiatrist, he said I wasn’t bipolar. Instead, he agreed with the diagnosis of depression, general anxiety, social anxiety, and OCD I had been given years prior.

I only asked because I heard someone once describe the mermaid that slinked out from under the bed and the man with the wide brim hat who lurked around corners. I guess it was my way of asking if what I saw was real. 

 ~~~

I cut myself in my last two years of high school and the year I dated my boyfriend. I started off using tweezers to scratch my forearms. Just for a twinge of pain that jolts through your body. Like how you stub your toe and all you can think about is how much your toe hurts. I moved to scissors, blade against my wrists and one time my neck. I stopped when I graduated from high school, the anxiety going dormant until university, where it clawed its way back to sink its hooks deep. I moved on from scissors. They no longer gave me what I needed.

I remember my forearms bleeding, red lines marking me, and all I could think about was the pain as I lay in bed. How it hurt. How stupid I was for doing it. How my family would freak about scarring. But it was a relief from the numbness. The endless staring at the ceiling or my phone. The napping. And when I wasn’t sleeping, the endless I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead, I wish I was—

The first time I did it with my boyfriend, he wanted to see. He examined the marks then pulled me into a hug. Please don’t do it again. Near the end, he called me to make sure I was still alive. Then he hung up. He and his friend wanted to watch a movie.

 ~~~

When he broke up with me I shattered. 

I’m not happy.

I can’t keep lying. 

I can’t say I love you anymore.

I can’t see a future with you.

I don’t know what I want.

Each word dripped acid, burning holes into my skin. Each emotion that passed through me created a clone of me. A me with holes in her legs as she sat on her knees and bowed her head into the hardwood flooring, wailing. A me with the deformities in her hands leaving the couch, leaving his side, and running away. Another me, too decayed to move, stuck on that old hand-me-down couch, the dying muscles in her jaw making it hard to talk.

He sat there, on the most used spot of the couch. The seat with the hole in the soft, frayed brown leather. The spot that was closest to the reading lamp. The one the dogs liked the most because it smelled like us and it was closest to the window where it was warm. He sat there just blinking. Watching me, maybe. Or maybe just waiting till he could leave. He sat there in the blue wool sweater I gave him for Christmas, spending about eighty dollars to get the gift shipped from the UK.

It was January third. Happy new year to me.

~~~

He stressed that I needed a therapist. That I needed help. So I saw a psychiatrist, who bumped up my medication and gave me the number of a therapist. Cognitive-behavioural therapy. It took a couple of days to prepare what I would say, and a couple more to finally stomp out my anxiety enough to call and leave the message. Hi, I’m a student at the university. My psychiatrist recommended you. Please call me back if I could schedule a consultation. It took a couple more unanswered phone calls on her end and mine before I switched to email. At this point, I begged the gods, God, Allah, Buddha, the higher spirits, my ancestors, anyone who was listening. Please let me get better. Please guide me until I can guide myself. Please let me be okay. I turned to resources on the university campus in the meantime.

The consultation got booked. 

~~~

It took months to pick up those glass shards, though I still found myself stepping on one occasionally. The shard reminding me of a boy, a past me, a different history.

But the figures were gone. My wrists shone pale and beige, the only marks from swatches of makeup. Or the glitter from a dress I bought online that seemed to get everywhere when I opened the bag.

Some days I couldn’t make it out of bed. Didn’t leave my home. I was lucky to shower and eat maybe one and a half meals a day. Shove orange slices into my mouth, comb my hair, and change into a clean pair of pyjamas. But those days grew few. 

I saw my family and friends regularly. Attended classes with decent grades. Took care of my health by eating well and exercising. Took the sleeping pills my psychiatrist prescribed when I couldn’t sleep. Saw my therapist every two weeks which changed to every three weeks.

 But journal entry after journal entry began: Dear diary, I miss him. Dear diary, why do I miss him? Dear diary, I shouldn’t miss him. Dear diary, I—

~~~

“How have you been doing?”

“I’ve been all right.”

“How are you feeling about your ex?”

“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”

 My therapist sat up straighter.

For the first time since the breakup, I let myself crack and spill, letting the yolk and white of me drip onto the armchair. She gestured to the tissue box on the table between us, and I grabbed tissue after tissue to plug up my eyes and nose. I unravelled all of myself, page after page of my journal, of his and my shared history, the textbook of us, until each page littered the ground of the office.

I lied. I didn’t unravel all of myself. Some pages I skipped. Some I didn’t want to admit. Don’t want to admit. Even now, those pages linger in my journal. I’ll admit them to myself later on, let the rush of anger burn my bedroom. Turn the room into an inferno before the wind dies down and the flame simmers out. And I’m left to clean up the mess. 

I soaked in my therapist’s energy, feeling the waves of yellow turn me golden.

“If he came to you right now, would you take him back?”

 The question I asked myself daily. Had been asking myself for months. The answers changing by my mood, by the moment, by the hour. There was no answer. He hadn’t come back.

 I removed my ex from my social media later that day, just like my therapist told me to do.

 I don’t look back.