Of monsters and men.

TRIGGER WARNING: horror, gore, anxiety & anxiety attacks

You never get used to looking monsters in the eye.

You've been dodging them right, left, and center since you were twelve and you know how to do everything else--how to avoid the claws that change length and strike when your guard's down. How to go-go-go-go for hours with their rancid breath stinking like wet coffee grounds and mold on the back of your neck. You've memorized the escape routes, mapped refuges in your head like the way you spell a lover's name. This book, that movie, the album you know all the nuances to. You can hide in the patterns and basslines for a while.

You learned how to take the hit with someone else, minimize their pain, share it like the more you bleed, the less they do. Sometimes it even works. Emergency emotional sutures are your specialty, followed closely behind by the Magic Words to Talk Someone Off an Emotional Ledge. Both work best on no sleep, 4 AM crisis calls, Diet Coke and Excedrin to keep your mind sprinting away from the demons faster than they can catch you, or anyone else. And then the danger has passed, somewhere between the desperate, panicked sobbing that took root in your chest and your partner's words shifting from desolate to somewhat acceptable in the real world. They cut you loose and slip into sleep or their own Anti-Monster Routine, full of chemicals and secrets they won't share, not even with you. You let them go--wasn't that the idea this whole time, digging your bitten-off nails into the rotting flesh of someone else's insecurities?--and the stares of the creatures from the insides of both your heads come back to haunt you.


Your hands shake too hard. Your chest is too small, heart too big, lungs suddenly incapable of normal functions. Gasp. Try and focus your eyes. Fail twice before you find enough presence of mind to realize your glasses are off and discarded on your floor somewhere because they were in the way of your tears. How long has it been since you breathed? Twenty-five seconds? Forty? Your chest is frozen shut. You tell yourself to gasp, inhale, god dammit breathe or you won't get the chance again, breathe already, BREATHE you mother FUCKER.

And you do, eventually, just in time to notice the way your head is spinning and everything is either too dark or too bright, nothing in between. You taste your last cigarette on the backs of your teeth and bite half-moons into your palms instead of standing out in the cold and repeating it won't work, it won't work, it won't work into the puffs of smoke rising from your cracked and bleeding lips. You close your eyes and try not to spin too much, but that only makes it worse. Imprints of danger on your closed eyelids. Panic hanging in imperceptible droplets from your lashes.

You don't have your own Anti-Monster Routine. You've spent too long patching up the holes in everyone else's. Your adrenaline leaves you in a rush as you remember that you never found a replacement for that kind of fuel. The collapse to your bed is too long for dead weight falling three feet. The press of your body, slowly betraying you into trembling that is bone-deep below zero, is too much to pull to the right place on the bed. Find a corner of a blanket and try to pull it over your like a shield. Try not to think about how much safer a pair of arms would be. Gasp--when is the last time you breathed, again?

Keep on the artificial lights like witches' lanterns. Pretend you did something to make them powerful. Pretend someone else found your Magic Words, the ones that etched themselves in wrist-bones and ankles to keep you safe. Pretend the war you just waged was for you, that the demon-spawn won't be back the day you think to yourself, Maybe we've both recovered from the last round.

Most of all, pretend you know how to forget. How to let all of this fade into fairy-tale and once-upon-a. Pretend you never looked a monster in the eye, that the eye never grew to twice its size and reflected your face and your fear and your life and made it look more terrifying than any set of crooked teeth and armored, swinging tails. Pretend you don't dream of that reflection swallowing you in the middle of the night, opening up like a sinkhole and eating you alive, that you are safe and sound in your bed and you don't have to fight this battle again next week, next month, next time you haven't slept and have spent eight hours listening to your little brother trip on acid. Pretend that it's over. Pretend it's all okay, now and forever, world without end, Amen.

Remind me--when is the last time you remembered to breathe?