Seeking: 20F, Category: Missed Connections

I’m looking for a twenty-year-old. You lived in the house on the corner of Twelfth Avenue for thirteen years. You used to crawl under the bed in the night because you didn’t want me to be lonely. I miss you.

I’ve looked everywhere for you. I checked the cupboards, because you used to get trapped in there when you were very small and didn’t have a grasp on speech yet. That was when you babbled at me and reached for my tangled hair, your fat little fingers catching in the knots. You were too young to be scared by the pitted bruises under my eyes. Fear wasn’t something you were familiar with yet.

I checked the back of the broom closet. We stood in there together when your mother was playing hide-and-seek with you. I was taller than you, and when you heard loud distant voices, you put your head on my unmoving chest and arms around my waist. You weren’t meant to. You were supposed to be afraid of me. But I think you had bigger things to be afraid of.

I checked under the dining room table. We used to drape a sheet over it when your parents were both out and make a fort, a castle, a palace. I was still learning what playing was. You showed me. I was the knight and you were the dragon. I was the princess and you were the king. You drew a crown on the back of a cereal box and I carved it out with my ragged nails. I asked once about making a sword, because knights had swords, and you shook your head so hard I was worried it might fall off. You didn’t like weapons. You didn’t like violence. You liked putting your pink butterfly plasters on the little pockmarked holes in my arms.

You had blonde hair when you were young. I don’t know if you’ve dyed it now, but it used to darken to honey-gold in the winter and lighten, with the touch of summer sun, to ripe wheat. Your mother did your hair when you were younger. Then you did it, and your ponytails were always a little bit messier than hers, no matter how hard you tried.

Your father wouldn’t help you. He’d barely help himself, and all the hissing in corners and stroking my nails down his face couldn't scare him. I think you were the only one who really saw me, although your mother might have glimpsed me once. She was putting you to bed and I was standing in the corner, my hair a curtain of spidery black, my hands clenching in the folds of my shift. She looked up, looked at me, and we made eye contact. She had lovely eyes, your mother, rich deep brown like your favourite chocolate cupcakes. We looked at each other, and I like to think I knew what she was trying to say to me. I like to think she was asking me to protect you.

I did try. I really did. But it was hard. Do you remember when you were twelve and angry? I do. You were angry so much of the time, angry at something you couldn’t name because you didn’t have the vocabulary for it. That was the year your mother died, and the bottles on the dinner table lined up like little soldiers in a regiment. We couldn’t put a sheet over them in case we knocked them over, so we mostly stayed in your bedroom. I carved tiny little hearts into the wallpaper, down near the carpet, and you tried to label all the parts. You said right atrium and left atrium and right ventricle, and I told you that you had your rights and lefts backwards. You said you didn’t. Hearts are labelled backwards. Then you asked me to do something else. Stomach, you said, or brain, or guts.

I couldn’t. I could only do hearts.

If you're reading this, you must remember your thirteenth birthday. The chocolate cupcake? You bought it on the way home from school. You didn’t have a candle and I couldn’t make one. Thirteen, I said. Thirteen was a big number.

You said thirteen was an unlucky number. I didn’t understand how that worked. Numbers are just numbers. If anything, twelve had been unlucky, because your mother died at twelve. There was a framed photo of her on your shelf. The glass was cracked, but she was still smiling. I didn’t quite understand photographs, then, either. I thought they could change like the weather. I kept waiting for her to frown.

Thirteen, I said. Make a wish.

You made a wish. You ate your cupcake. You were born in spring, early spring, and it was already dark outside, but you didn’t want to go to sleep. You had such a hard time with sleep.

I was meant to make it harder. Did you know that? I think you knew. I was meant to haunt you, to horrify you. I was meant to be that nameless shape in the dark, that thing given a voice only with the howl of the wind, glimpsed in the midnight shadows. I was meant to scare you, but you were already scared. It was very hard to even worry you. I loved you before you had words, when you were a baby gurgling and giggling at my white face and colorless eyes. You reached for my long thin teeth and I caught your fingers in my mouth, held your chubby little wrist between my awful incisors.

You laughed. I let you go.

Thirteen years later, you were lying in your bed. I was lying beneath your bed. It took maybe ten minutes for you to slide out of your duvet and come huddle with me, a flimsy blanket grasped tight in your thin hand, spreading it over the both of us. I didn't have any body heat to give. You didn’t care. You just wanted someone - something - close. I was your teddy and your toy since you didn’t really have any. Your father got rid of your stuffed animals after your mother died, said you were all grown up now. I hovered at the end of his bed for a month after that. I don’t think he got much sleep, but then alcohol is more potent than I am, and can affect someone so much more.

I’m sorry. I lose track so easily. I’m meant to be insubstantial and I am, I mostly am, but my memories hold me down. I am meant to wander. I struggle with that. Before you were born, I could drift from house to house, haunting children, waking adults with the horrible spectre I made. My existence was a warning, my body a nightmare. It was harder once you existed. Sometimes I had to walk rather than float. I was so corporeal when we were playing that my gums hurt from my overfilled mouth and the knots in my hair caught on things. I didn’t know how to cope with the aches and pains of existence, not like you did.

You were under the bed with me when you started bleeding. You thought it was nothing at first. I put my hand on your stomach where you said it hurt. You didn’t mind that my hands were cold and rough, even when I did. You were always so soft, so yielding, like a paper toy. I was scared of hurting you.

You said it really hurt, and went to the bathroom. I followed. You knew how to place your steps so the landing didn’t creak and your father didn’t wake. I put my feet where yours had been, like a game.

You found blood. You weren’t scared you were dying - you were very sensible and calm - but you were worried you had been hurt. I couldn’t help. I didn’t know how to. I barely understood a body that could change like the tides, that could bleed without injury, that could shift and renew. Thirteen was late for these things, I think, but you were always too small. Nobody ever checked you were eating enough, or that you went to school with all your things in the right order. I had to give you your bookbag more than once.

You made do with some black socks. The next evening, when you were home from school, you showed me the crinkly plastic box someone had given you. You said it was, apparently, normal. I hovered beside you as you did the laundry, cheeks tinted a little red but furiously determined not to feel shame. I was very proud of you. Thirteen and a day and so practical, even if I had a sense that I should not be the one beside you as you did these things.

There was no one else. No one better.

I hope there is now. I hope there’s someone to hold you when you cry, someone who can wipe away your tears without worrying their nails are going to break through the delicate parchment of your skin. I hope there’s someone who kisses your forehead with warm lips. It’s been so long since I saw anyone. Since anyone saw me. I’m beginning to fade. Even on the darkest nights, I can barely stir a gasp from a child waking, seeing my hunched form. I think I am going away. I think I am okay with that. I have not wanted to scare people for a very long time now, although I still do. It’s in my nature and you cannot fight what you are.

I just want to know where you are. My curiosity is rotting my chest from the inside. I miss your smile and your laugh and the way your tongue pressed into the corner of your mouth when you were focusing on covering my arms with pink plasters.

Your father died when you were thirteen. He was drunk and he fell down the stairs. He stepped backwards because he saw a figure in the corner of his hallway, a figure with long dark hair and nails like claws. He wasn’t scared of me, not really. He just thought I was someone else, with chocolate-brown eyes and a grudge to hold.

I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known they would take you away. Nobody had cared before. But now you had no parents, and someone thought having no parents was more of a worry than having a father who never made you a meal in his life. I don’t understand it. I thought we could stay in the house together. I thought you could come home from school, and I could watch you make pasta, and you could eat it under a table clean and tidy and free of clinking bottles. I thought I could learn to braid your hair so you didn’t have to do it yourself. I thought you could master nail polish and make my claws into something else. Instead, I watched them take you away. You looked over your shoulder as you were led away, into the doorway of the house, where a shadowy figure hovered and could go no further.

Please. If you’re out there and you read this, come see me. I can’t go to you, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. I’ll still be in the house on the corner, even though the new owners have painted the kitchen table white and wallpapered over the hearts scratched into your bedroom wall. You know where I am.

In the night, settled in the shadows, I imagine you. I imagine you padding softly into the bedroom, hair tied back in a ponytail that’s always just a little too messy. I imagine you lying down and pulling yourself under the bed with me. I imagine us pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, your breathing a patient rhythm through the deep long night.

I’m sorry I let them take you away. Come back to me.

I’m still waiting under your bed.