Coming Clean

I've been feeling, well, guilty. Not lying exactly, just keeping out a part. One piece of me, like that song. "Pieces of Me!" Who's it by? It doesn't matter, anyway, but it's a big piece. A mountain range. A continent.

It's time to own up. Nut up, Madison. Confess. The meds and the work for Linda the Anal Retentive Goddess of Thrift Stores. (We call her that when we get mad at her. It's not a big thing.) There's a reason. There's one big reason and I've been trying to keep it out of the blog.

The creature.

I mentioned him, of course. How could I not, but I should explain, yes? It's time to. You deserve it.

It's like this. I saw things. No, that's wrong. Not just things. A lot of people see things that aren't there and it's bad, but it wasn't this. I saw one thing. A figure. An imaginary friend like a joke gone bad.

I don't want to tell you what he looks like. The last time I did that people listened. Then those people told other people who had been drawing pictures and putting them on the internet. When they saw my words and they looked at these pictures, they told me it was the same thing. The creature had a name there, but I don't use it.

My therapist tells me that calling him the other name overcontexualizes it. Start calling him that and you start believing he's real again.

And he felt so real.

For so long I felt haunted by this thing. This thing I cannot, will not, describe. Not now, not here. But I thought he followed me.

I saw him in mirrors. You know, the reflection on the medicine cabinet from every low-budget, crappy horror movie you've ever seen. Then outside of windows. Windows that weren't even at ground level.

He was behind my car, he was outside of my house, and he was even in my bedroom. He just wouldn't leave. And when I thought this things was following me, I started to do crazy things.

I hurt someone that I really cared about. I hurt them so bad that they may never recover. But, like the creature, I can't describe that now. It's too soon. It's too real.

So that's the depth of my crazy. That's the reason for everything else in my life now.

But I don't want to think about him now, because in spite of my loneliness I feel better. He has no hold on me.

Madison is not broken, that's what I tell myself. Madison is cracked and little by little I fill in the cracks with caulk and start to paint over the drywall.

One day I will be fixed. And when that day comes I will be the daughter, the sister, and the friend that I always wanted to be but couldn't.

Some day soon, I will be whole.