Don't Fear Me Anymore, Annalisa

It haunts her.

Rain when it pours, thunder when it rumbles, lightning when it strikes. Wind when it howls in darkness and in it, one could swear it made out a few words: I’d kill you, I’d hurt you, I’d stalk you, I’d make everyone forget you – and an echo that goes easily, easily, easily, until it slowly fades away into nothing, as if it were never there. Darkened shadows, keys between the fingers, an Uber driver’s wrong left-hand turn that accelerates into a highway in the opposite direction. Steps that follow you without a face or familiarity, a leaky faucet when you’ve just turned it off, a creak in the basement when you’re home alone and helpless. Eerie music that inches you toward the edge of your seat about to slip off entirely as the spinny-spin-spin of the blackened night owl’s head goes around and around and around, in refusal to let you out of its sight.

Yes, her state of mind haunts her. She doesn’t let anyone know it, but it does. In bed she lies, and a voice reminds her like it did yesterday and the night before that and the night before that and the night before that as well, that it would be so easy to disappear without a trace. Just like that she’d be gone, and nobody would be able to find her, speak with her, criticize her, belittle her, lecture her, complain about her or judge her or the weakness she accidentally clings to – not anybody that cared about her, that is. The thoughts are wild as they always are when the sun goes down, and it turns her into the very owl she suddenly fears – she doesn’t sleep. She’s exhausted, but she’s wide awake and there’s nothing she can do to change it. She’s up too late, and her tears get quieter. She gets better at hiding it every time she does it.

I know it, because I know her. She couldn’t hide a thing from me if she tried.

“There are 64 tiles on my bedroom ceiling,” she once said, a long long time ago, and now here she is, counting the very last star in the galaxy to the very last blinking twinkle. The blades of grass, the grains of sand, and the hairs of her head – she becomes the first person in the entire world to number them, and the bags beneath her eyes show it. Oh my, she’s paid for such with every ounce of life left in her eyes, and it hurts my heart, it hurts my soul, that I’m unable to do anything for her like I used to do – or tried to do, at the very least.

All I can do is watch her from her balcony, pitying her as she surges with panic when she awakens from another one of her nightmares at 3:33 a.m, and it grows into a rapid fire of screaming, –nails to a chalkboard screaming– a terrible, terrible terror it is when she sees me, wings tucked at my sides, beak shiny, feathers ruffled – in attempts to look my best. It’s still not enough. If only she knew that I was her next-door neighbor, her admirer ever since I met her for the very first time, oh, back when I was alive. I can imagine her taking in my embrace like we used to do when I heard she was struggling to make ends meet and I bought her a few groceries to help her out, or when I’d leave her a flower bouquet out of coupons because I knew she’d appreciate that more than the real thing she’d have to waste water to care for.

But her husband didn’t like me, and it ended in a duel to fight for that lovely, fair maiden. I stabbed that man, and stabbed him and stabbed him again, but he wouldn’t leave. He was so painfully stubborn and irritating to even the sharpest of knives, and that idiotic determination helped him to play smart with my wine and his poisons, mixed in a concoction I didn’t know about until it was too late, and I was gone, just like this woman wants to be. I don’t know what her dumb husband is now – if he was one of the crickets I gobbled up that loitered nearby, if he became a giraffe in Africa, a penguin at the north pole or whatever else. I don’t know and I don’t care! But I do know that his bones are beneath my old floorboards and his teeth are at the back of my bookcase, still rattling every so often if the spring breezes hit it just right.

Why, Annalisa, do you fear me? We could've been! We were almost there.

I love you.