By: Emma D. Thompson
Inside me claws a terrible beast with long sharp fangs and equally terrifying talons. It’s been slowly growing over the course of my life, but its dark color developed the day my parents divorced, when I started to worry about The Future and how it might change. I felt its strength and power in the small black germ but knew even then how to contain it. I let it settle deep inside me and for years, it stayed that way, always in the pit of my stomach, even as my knees grew painful and my limbs gangly. Soon I sprouted into an awkward adolescent, and this beast became a part of me.
After years of only allowing it out behind closed doors of burying it so deep as to keep it out of my relationships, I was tired. It had grown to match my size, threatening to even outgrow me. It found its way out of my cracks, oozing into every inch of the life I tried to keep it from. The beast kept me from finding the joy I didn’t know I deserved in friends, family, even a boy I loved more than I loved myself.
It was particularly fond of this area of my life, of the healthy and strong partnership I had nurtured in its shadow. What started out as a simple and pure love slowly became infected by the sour insecurities implanted by the beast. Even through this, I kept it at bay, determined to hold onto the one thing that kept me tethered to the ground.
Angry at being locked away, of only ever pushing past the gates in small bursts, the beast ravaged me with a new strength in the weeks before I started college. The night I slept in my new bed for the first time, I was so drenched in darkness I didn’t see the sun for months.
I had always known the beast was there, a vague mist hanging around me in the periphery, but now it was starting to take a real shape. It no longer lived in my stomach. Instead, it nuzzled into the sticky tissue of my heart, deep within the arteries that pumped fear tainted blood through my muscles and bones.
And that was even before the day of its escape.
The summer I turned nineteen, my already weakened heart was ripped out of its cavity. I caught a close look at the beast that day in the car after the conversation was over, after the relationship was over, after he walked away and out of my life. The sickly cream color of my hands blurred into the blackness of the steering wheel. My raw demon uncorks itself from inside and look me dead in the face. I sat for minutes that felt like hours, staring at this ugly piece of me, this roaring pit of darkness that had developed from a small seed to the monster that now sat on my chest.
Somehow I made it out of the car and into my bed that night, where I didn’t move for days. My mother brought food I didn’t dare eat, things I didn’t dare distract myself with. I laid with my soul in my throat and my insides completely hollow, unable to escape the beast’s prison.
It was stronger than me now, double my size, and hungry for my flesh. I laid there numbly while over and over again it washes through me until I was empty and decayed, left like a pile of trash on the road, like he had left me.
It took me two weeks to gather the strength to fight off the beast enough to stand. I practically crawled my way through the house, almost crushed by its weight. I’ll never forget my parents’ faces when I exited my black hole that first time. They looked at me like I was a ghost. Maybe I was. I studied myself in the mirror later that night, wondering if they could see the beast. I was so disturbed by the dark half-moons under my eyes and the hollowness of my cheeks, I made sure not to look at my reflection again.
And so I lived.
A month went by and my beast and I co-habitated. I would give in to it most days if I was allowed even an hour of feeling like myself. I could read for a while or laugh with my family, but after that one hour the cloud of blackness would descend from its pit under my fragile skin and swallow me whole. The beast was a strict warden.
Sometimes when I felt like I had the upper hand, its ominous voice would whisper to me in the dark and I’d be cold all over. I would watch my control slide out of my ear during the night onto my sheets in a cold, black sludge.
After one unexpected “good” day, where I had been allowed to live outside the beast, I thought I could push myself even farther past its reach. I collected all the evidence of us that I had quickly stashed into my closet that first night and packed it neatly into a sturdy cardboard box with the sharpie words “DO NOT DONATE” scribbled on the side. After it was safely in the garage, I felt the beast falter inside me. My breath caught. Was it time for me to shove it back into its cage?
As one last goodbye to my love, I signed onto the last place I could see his face, the last social media outlet he hadn’t blocked me on. As the page loaded I could feel the beast stirring beneath the surface, anxious to grab onto me. I wasn’t prepared for the acute pain of the beast’s touch then, nor for the picture I saw under his name. Their smiling faces looked up at me happily as they leaned into each other, holding the other tight. I didn’t even put up a fight when the beast overtook me. Its long claw gutted me from nose to naval, barely allowing me the time to put down the phone and get into bed.
For more than forty-eight hours I stayed under the weight of three blankets. With my mother out of town, and my sister working long hours into the night, it was easy to stay in that one spot. Now, I couldn’t even differentiate what was the beast and what was me. For those forty-eight hours I didn’t eat, sleep, or speak -the longest I had gone in any of those things. At the twenty-six-hour mark, I closed my eyes hoping I wouldn’t open them again.
Forced to get out of bed by an engagement I couldn’t cancel, I drove in silence as cars passed me on the freeway. I gripped the steering wheel so tight my knuckles blanched. Was there really only a month between this moment and the moment he told me it was over? Lost in thought, I almost veered into a close car, resulting in a blaring horn and a staunch middle finger. Back in my lane I was disappointed that my car hadn’t found its mark. I wanted it to hit me, anything to kill the beast. I said it over and over to myself, what I had been feeling for days – was it weeks? – that I wanted all the pain to stop.
I sat for a while outside the house, letting myself sweat in the blistering heat of the car. The beast was as big as it would ever be. It was ripping me apart, and it wasn’t going to stop.
I went to the family gathering. To my surprise I kept the beast from showing, smiling at all the right moments, and even interjecting a shallow laugh or two. At the end of the day I laid in bed, scared of myself and the beast that I had turned into. I felt lucky to slip easily into sleep.
Buried beneath the monster, however, almost completely squashed, was a voice. So gentle and low I almost missed it. The voice was me. Or what I wanted myself to be, what I knew I could be without the beast. All these years a small fraction of myself remained unchanged. This voice knew there was still hope.
…
When I awoke the next morning, I felt stronger. Not stronger than the beast but strong enough to get out of bed. Days went by like this. Every night I would fall asleep to the voice of hope that things could be different, and every morning I would shrug off the dark as I shook off my blankets.
I filled out form after form and sat through phone call after phone call, wasting entire afternoons setting up appointments and getting transferred to different departments. I would’ve sat through a hundred more, knowing this was the only way I would survive. The beast seemed confused at first, throwing everything it could at me to break my resolve. Just when I thought it might, I heard the nurse on the other side tell me I had a meeting for the next day.
The beast kept me pacing in the minutes before I walked into the office, and even I was scared of what I might be if the beast was gone, if there was even anything left.
I eventually went in, and listened to an even more powerful voice than the one that had kept me alive through the night. It guided me through myself, and not only told me that I could change, but that I could fight the beast. It taught me how to vomit it out and slash at it until it learned it had no place in my body.
Now I would see the beast sprinting forward when it wanted to consume me. I found I could scream with such a might it would sever its hold and scamper off. Some nights, it wouldn’t come at all. I could feel it getting smaller and smaller; I knew it was running out of places to hide.
For seven aching months I pushed myself to do the things that the beast wouldn’t want me to do. I poured over books, ate delicious food, and climbed hills under beautiful rising suns that made me feel like I could fly. I wrote letters I would never send, and screamed into my pillow a dozen times, anything to get it out of me. I found I could have days where he wouldn’t cross my mind at all, or where my laughter would be real. I wasn’t just surviving anymore. I was living. And in a deep part of me I realized I liked being alive, I liked feeling like I had a life to live.
That was eventually the final blow, the last ounce of strength I needed to shove the darkness out, to let in the light.
Some nights I’ll still wake up in a cold sweat, feeling broken and exhausted, the beast sliding from the shadows and joining me in the sheets. But those nights are rare. Mostly I sleep until morning. And when I look at my face in the mirror, I see the warrior girl I have become.
