Haunted

Months of therapy helped me to believe that the monster wasn't real, that I had made it up.  Acute stress reaction.  Dr. Moser had a name or label for everything. He was particularly experienced with children who had been or witnessed a traumatizing event.  In an attempt to gain my trust and establish a "safe space" with me, he had revealed that he himself had suffered something similar when he was my age.  

I strongly doubted that a monster had materialized from under his bed and kidnapped his baby sister after he had been a complete jerk to her.  I've been told that it's not all that common.  The issue of monsters set aside, I wasn't all that sure that he was even telling the truth about his childhood trauma at all.  Grown ups have a way of lying to kids to make them believe all kinds of things.  I thought it was entirely gross to make up a terrible story in order to empathize with someone, so I made it my goal of every session to make his job as hard as possible.  I was mean and uncooperative, and I wasn't above saying whatever I could think of to try to get a reaction out of him.  It proved that your mom jokes were the least effective for this purpose.  He often just laughed and nodded his head.

But as hard as I tried, he was a man of endless patience and disgusting compassion.  And he had a way of sounding so smart, and making things seem so reasonable.  In the end, I was so doped up on anxiety pills and anti-depressants that I was complacent in my own brainwashing.  

Just because I no longer believed the monster had been there, however, didn't mean that my dreams were a safe, monster-free zone.  I thought that Gracie might have been haunting me.  

Fast forward to the next year.  Getting through puberty in a public school is hard enough on its own.  It's so much worse when your low-income family is the community topic of endless gossip and scrutiny.  

People at school whispered loudly, in that way that people have when they're pretending to be discreet, but they totally want you to know that they're talking about you.  Some of them thought that I killed my sister.  Or they thought that my parents abused the lot of us, and accidentally killed her themselves.  Or they just whispered about how my family has fallen apart since her disappearance.  

Word eventually got out that I was in therapy.  I was known in the rumor mill as "Crazy Gloria," "Kill Joy," or "Gloria Deathly," which was a clever spin on my real name, Gloria Lively.  Aside from those few though, most of my rumor-given names really didn't make much sense.  All in all, most people just weren't very creative, when it got down to it.  My therapist laughed when I told him that. 

"I'm glad that you aren't taking them too seriously.  People are going to talk.  You suffered a traumatizing event, and there are a lot of questions that we just can't answer.  Some people may never understand that, and you will have to pick and choose your battles," he had told me.  "You can't let their gossip get to you.  That being said, however, if their behavior escalates and you feel threatened or harassed, you can't be afraid to stand up for yourself or ask for help.  School is supposed to be a safe place where you can learn, and your teachers have a duty to look out for and protect you.  Let them do their jobs for you."   

Dr. Moser wasn't at all how I thought a therapist should have been.  He didn't often ask me about how a particular event "made me feel," per se.  Instead, he would ask me to break down my thought process and ask why I felt the things that I was feeling.  He said that sometimes, people let their emotions have too much control over themselves.  And when we can evaluate why we are feeling what we feel, we are better able then to say "my reasons for feeling this emotion are irrational or invalid," and we can change course or react more appropriately after we recognize that.  

This didn't work out so well for me.  I know you don't know me very well, and I don't know what you've been able to pick up about me yet.  But I'm not a stop-and-think-about-my-emotions-first type of person.  This has gotten me into trouble a few times, as you'll hear about later.  Lucky for the both of us, I have since learned to temper my impulsive personality.  I've learned a lot, and I can tell you first-hand that everything you do has a consequence to it.  Sometimes the consequences are minor, no big deal.  But we can't be so lucky all the time.  

Anyways, I digress. 

Fast forward another two years later.  I'm almost fourteen, and I'm now convinced that Gracie has been haunting me.  I saw her everywhere, in everything I did.  Looking at my reflection on the mirror sometimes, I would swear that she had been sitting on my bed watching me get around for school.  When I closed my eyes, I could see her tiny fingers scratching at my floor as she was dragged away, looking for anything she could cling to.  

Instead, she clung to my thoughts.  I couldn't forget about her the way my parents somehow seemed to be able to.  They never talked about her anymore.  Mom would check out at the mention of her name, and dad would close his eyes, and shake his head, like he was angry that I would dare to bring her up.  I was so angry with them, I didn't understand how they could just pretend she had never existed.  I made sure to talk about her, or say her name at every chance.  If I couldn't, I wouldn't let them forget her either.  

At this time, I was getting about three hours of sleep every night, non-consecutively, of course.  It was now nearing the end of another miserable school year that I had skipped the majority of.  When I did show up, I ghosted through the halls, a wraith no one wanted to get too near to.  People moved to the other side of the hall when they saw me coming.  I once bumped into a girl, admittedly on purpose, just to see what she would do.  She gasped and started praying.  It was almost funny.  Almost.  

In class, I acted out or was disruptive - even "abusive" towards other students.  As if they didn't deserve it, with all of the horrible things they've said and thought about my family.  Eventually, my parents stopped answering the school's phone calls.  My teachers, though irritated and noticeably concerned, weren't sure how to treat me any more.  I was the troubled child.  The girl who claimed that monsters stole my baby sister.  Whatever the truth of her disappearance, they believed it had clearly resulted in a broken home.  Divorcing parents, a brother spending his first months as an adult in jail, and I'm seemingly proceeding down the same path.  My family was now a blight on a once shining little town.

Author's Note

Updated as of 6/4/17