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Haunted

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Written by Arian Mabe

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A follow on from Frankie's monologue: Cages of the Past. An experimental piece, warning for themes of abusive relationships, death/suicide, mental health issues and self-harming.

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Five years on and you still haunt me. Can you believe that? It should not be so and yet it is. I suppose it is the way of what you are, though I cannot find a term for you that does not seem contrived and force. You are your own kind and, my dear, I am glad to see the back of you. The cold contact was shockingly easy but, then again, I don't reckon you were ever the type to actually make any effort. Of course, that was for others to do, wasn't it? You didn't need to make any sort of effort because you were wonderful. You were amazing.

You were perfect.

That doesn't mean, of course, that you don't try to slink back into my life still - or your puppets don't try, if I'm to be entirely accurate and honest here. Maybe I notice. Maybe I don't. I'm good at blanking out the white noise now, your background clamour. I remember that one that contacted me just before I went on holiday, told me how dreadful you'd been doing since I left you. I'm sure that was a lie. There were many lies back then and only more now as I unpick the ruins of the catastrophe that you called a relationship. Maybe it was to you. Control and abuse... Yes, I can say it now. And maybe it's about time I stood up tall and fucking shouted it.

Lies, lies, lies: all of the lies. Sometimes I wonder how much of anything you said was the actual truth as it seemed purely all designed, in the glow of hindsight, to manipulate and utilise what little worth I had to you. Of course, I was not the only one. It wasn't love. It wasn't really anything at all - not really. There was nothing there and yet everything there as long as I continued to feed you all the sweet lines and energy you clearly so desperately craved. That's all I can suspect it was for, of course, you took every last shred of my being from me, bit by bit.

Remember when you told me you'd kill yourself if I left you? Guess that was a lie too. I'm almost sorry... No. No. I am sorry. The world would be a better place without your poison in it, seeping into the cracks and crevices of good, kind-hearted souls. If you were gone, the world would be a better place, although I will not sully the ears of the sweet with the bitterness of your name. How many more have been hurt by you? I wish I could save them all but what I am I but the madwoman, the arsehole ex that left you when you said you'd kill yourself?

Paints me in a pretty bad light, doesn't it? But it is what it is... Back then, I thought that I had to kill myself to escape his clutches. And, in mentality, I very nearly succeeded. I could be gone, snuffed out, with so many none the wiser as to why I would have taken my own life, seeking out the quiet, the peace, the end just to escape through any means possible.

You could say that I was desperate.

Dying, is an art,

And, like everything else, I do it exceptionally well.

Am I kind-hearted? I've become someone far removed from what I was, so much so that I don't recognise the person I was back then, that five years ago. I want to go back and take her from that situation, tell her that there's something more for her. But, like everyone else in the depths of darkness, I had to find the light for myself and swim to the surface for that blissful breath of air amongst the drowning.

For I shall not drown - not in the memory of you. And, yet, I still wonder: why? Why did you do it? And why does the memory of you haunt me so? Why do I still toss and turn and wake from nightmares where I can't breathe? It should be long gone, the memory but a painful one forgotten, and yet I still remember and I still fear. It still cuts deep and it's still there.

"Let go."

I said that once, your hands around my throat. I woke from that dream loudly enough to wake my partner. I hated those dreams. I hated the masked villain chasing me down corridors that twisted and wove and led to nowhere - no escape, of course. I hated my breath coming in short, sharp pants, a single one nowhere near enough to rake in air to my lungs.

But, you know, I'm to blame, aren't I? That's what was always said. I was at fault, everything was my fault, I was wrong - everything was all so very, very wrong because of me.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I hate that you twisted me. I hate how I behaved because of you. I'm glad I fucked off.

You could say that I was selfish. I still think in that little, nasty part of myself, that I was selfish, in a way. I should have been there for you - maybe I could have saved you if only I had been a better girlfriend, the nice girl that you deserved. I wasn't nice, was I? I didn't give you all of my attention and that was wrong of me. That was why you cut yourself. That was why you threatened to kill yourself.

Because of me. You wanted to die because of me.

I would say that the feeling was mutual but you didn't truly want to die. It was all part of the act, the grand reveal. Yet, maybe, I was the cunt after all and, one day, I'll read about your death and feel bad. Maybe I'll blame myself. And, so, the cycle continues so very long after, me to blame, as I always was. Because I was useless, I was worthless - I was prideful. I dared try to look after myself.

That was wrong. Oh so very, very, very wrong.

The logical part of me understands that this is wrong. Not what I did but how I think about it. And, really, who can blame me for being so caught up in the twists and turns of a broken mind. I know I'd be dead now if I had not have gotten out when I did. Then, perhaps, I would be the one haunting memories but they certainly wouldn't be your memories.

No. As soon as my energy was gone from the world, I would have clearly been dead to you.

They say I've got an attitude problem. They say I hurt you. They say I've "got a stick up my ass". I say "arse".

I say, I left an abusive relationship. And I fucking survived.

I say I am as I am.

Yet...still haunted. Still turning, still tossing, still wishing you were dead. The same old thought patterns are there, better ingrained than lost or replaced, and the same loathing of one's self lingers, twisting and curling about whatever is left of my soul.

Think and think... Come out of the pattern, into the break. It'll get better. But I don't always believe that. Sometimes I think that I'll be left stuck where I was because I still wake sometimes and think I'm back there, gripped by terror as the fairy lights flicker before my eyes, causing myself physical pain just to get away from the demonic churning in the pit of my cut.

Do you know what blood looks like trickling from your own arm after you've sliced into it? It's a strange sight, very different to seeing an injury bleed. You're detached, set back from the situation as you raise the blade for just one more. It got me by, I said, but it was just another symptom of the curse ripping through me, poison blackening my heart.

Yet... Here I am. It's not been easy since but it's been easier. Anything is easier than you, the constant manipulation, hurt, pain, suffering, insomnia, drinking. Some the symptoms of the first. It doesn't really matter what order they come in. But I wasn't to blame for that, lies twisted into every forgotten corner of my mind.

Yet, here I am. Broken but not defeated. Quieted but not silenced. Haunted but not afraid of the dark.

Maybe one day, the haunting will fade and I'll come through to the light. Maybe one day, I can stay in the light and smile, rather than returning to the darkness where the tightness, once again, locks around my heart, the fluttering pulse of anxiety. Maybe I won't spiral into depression, knowing when a low is coming on and clamouring to stop it - often to no avail. Sometimes I stop it. That's how I know I'm just a little bit better.

For the disease you set in me shall not win and neither shall this haunting continue.

Haunting, you are, yet I am not the haunted. I refuse to me.

This life is purged of ghosts, for that is all I wish you to be. Be a demon in the smoke, for all I care: I no longer wish anything of your lingering, living memory.

You were but a bad dream. A nightmare that lasted far, far too long and took up far too many years of my life - what should have been wonderful years of my life. They were spent chained to you, beaten in mind and crumbling just a little bit more with the falling of every passing day.

It happened and it is what it is. I cannot delve back into time and change the fabric of what happened.

Yet no one said your haunting must last forever.

And it shall not.