Jordan Maree embraces all their memories, despite the haunted house that restlessly taunts their mind.
When our memories are vessels for nostalgia, the worst of remembrance is confronting an unfortunate reality: we cannot go back. We wish on falling stars, build science fiction time machines, and whisper prayers to deities and saviours, but we cannot change the laws that govern our universe. We grow to accept that despite how often we visit the grave, the tombstone remains standing; a memorial of what we have lost to time. We could perform rituals and séances but will only ever remain in the present, for the past is the one who visits with a standing reservation. No amount of necromancy can revive what once was or change what is.
Against these odds, we go to great lengths to conjure memories and harbour no aversion to trying to summon the spirits of time from the depths of our temporal lobe. Yet not all memories are worth remembering. There exists a mechanism in our brains that acts as a filter, deciding what is most important to us — births, deaths, marriages, and the like. We train our minds to not forget and celebrate milestones and anniversaries because we are in the business of making and maintaining memories. We move forward in the present by paying tribute to the past but what about the memories we want to forget? What about the things we pray, beg, and bargain with ourselves to lay to rest? What are we to do with restless souls?
I live inside my body like it’s a haunted house and every day has turned into a horror movie. I’m forced to live with the ghosts that haunt me. This was where they were begotten, just as I was born in this body, too. We must coexist, not as roommates but in symbiosis. While they fester and reproduce in the walls, I am the flesh that feeds the past. I pay this penance because I am no stronger than these memories’ will to live.
There was no choice to be made. All was certain from the beginning. I cannot sell this house to an unbeknownst family who is blissfully unaware of the tragic history that vibrates in the walls and threatens to unearth itself from beneath the floorboards. This is my burden to bear and I cannot leave because I am perpetually trapped within these walls. Each exit is smoothed over with no edges to crack open or door knobs to turn. The keys were thrown away the day I was born. I’m not sure if they ever even existed. Some windows welcome daylight, but they are reinforced with steel bars and my days are only so long. This house of horrors is my cage, and my cellmates are the reminders of the worst things to have ever happened to me.
I have tried to make this haunted house inhabitable, willing it to sustain life. I fill its rooms with fresh flowers, but they always die. I paint the walls bright and promising colours, but the mould always germinates and spores always blossom beneath the surface. Maybe that’s why I can’t breathe. I lather the walls in glue and plaster them with wallpaper, but they always peel and slide off like the skin slippage of a decomposing corpse. I retile the bathrooms and kitchen, but they always crack and splinter, cutting me open every time I enter.
Always. Always. Always. The decline is predictable now. This house never ceases to putrefy and decompose, no matter what I do. Not even termites want to gnaw on its rotting bones. Every night it collapses from the weight of its own decay, and by morning it rebuilds itself. It’s like I must die every evening and come back to life by dawn. My body is tired of the constant resurrection.
I don’t know if this house was always haunted but I do know horror movies. There is a specific narrative progression unique to the genre; its very own formula for terror. With this as my guide, it must have started slowly. First came the anxiety of an unknown origin and as it grew and generalised to all parts of my life, I was smothered by a blanket of unease. I was, and still am, suffocating. It is like living with a slow-growing, malignant tumour in my hippocampus, nestled somewhere between the folds of my brain. Somewhere between my first day of preschool and the first time we moved homes. There, it would begin to metastasise.
In the beginning, the flashbacks were like blinking. They would only cross my mind in the time it took for my eyelids to flutter. I believed that if I just kept my eyes open, if I didn't sleep, then maybe they would leave me alone. So that’s what I did, but this method had about the same efficacy as a child hiding beneath the covers. That was all I was after all – a child. But I hoped that just maybe, someone would recognise my juvenility and I would be spared. Maybe the universe would show me mercy just this once. I promised I wouldn’t be greedy, I wouldn’t ask for anything else again. But if that were the case, I would not be writing this. There is no reprieve for the haunted. The preservation of my innocence meant prolonging my trauma and guilt. While I believed that keeping that little girl alive – the only good and pure thing about me left – would somehow project who I was onto who I am, I only became a caricature of the past. It was pathetic, like a happy mask worn by a sad clown. And as time does with most things, it eventually took her from me, in all her innocence. I’ve been searching for her since.
As the horror story progressed, so did the aggression with which this haunting manifested. It all began with shadows seen in my periphery, sleep paralysis demons standing at the foot of the bed, and nightmares beyond my comprehension. Soon, the culmination of all the trauma I had experienced began to manifest itself physically, like a poltergeist. My everyday life was littered with jumpscares. I jump when a man looks at me on the street, or when the wind slams a door shut. Smells. Touches. Voices. Words. Energy. They are all haunted, too. The veil between these two worlds, where I exist in the past and the present, is exceptionally thin.
My memories now take the form of malevolent creatures that not only exist in the shadows of the mind, but take possession of the body. Remembering can feel like a grotesque hand crawling from the depths of my chest and slithering up my throat. It can feel like its pointed claws plucking my eyes from their sockets, from inside my skull, to return them to a time I’d rather forget. Memories hit me like a loud clash of thunder in a swirling storm. They strike me like lightning hitting sand, turning my body and nervous system into hot, molten glass.
PTSD and all that I knew of it from film and television never seemed like enough to describe my trauma. Four letters felt insufficient. Yet these dramatic and surreal depictions have become how I experience life. I am the haunted house. I am the possessed girl. I am the cursed object. This is the end of my world.
All of this can be true, but is not mutually exclusive.
I am also my home. I can be exorcised from my demons. I can be blessed, cleansed, and pure again. This is not the end of my world.
I am my own final girl.
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