Ghosts

As a child, I’d lie awake for hours listening to my heart reverberate in my eardrums, convinced the steady thump thump thump was someone pacing our kitchen, a nightly visitor only I could hear. When the loneliness became overwhelming, I’d wander into my parents’ room and curl up on their discarded bedspread, eventually drifting off to the symphony of their snores. It was comforting to know that others could sleep when I was unable. Slipping into soft oblivion was possible, I just had to work harder at it.

In adulthood, I can fall asleep fine, but I do not know the last time I’ve stayed that way until morning. Four or five times a night, I wake, the milky light of the outside world inking through my blinds, contouring my bedroom in shadow. Occasionally, I jolt awake to great bursts of light, as if someone has taken a flashbulb photograph that burns through my closed eyelids. This happens mostly in the 3 o’clock hour, when the veil is thin.

And in that dead of night, otherwise quiet, I hear whispering. I’ve decided, for my sanity, that my dead relatives are checking in on me, making sure I’m safely tucked away. These new guests murmur from darkened corners and over my shoulder, in the crack between my pillow and wall. I turn my fan on high to drown them out.

Thank you for visiting, I say. Please let me sleep.

They never do.


Demons

I acquired my sleep paralysis while dog-sitting, of all things. I wake even more than usual in new places, unsettled by the creaking of an unfamiliar home, convinced that I’ll find some unknown intruder has crept through an unlocked window.

That night, I opened my eyes and saw a hulking figure in the doorway of the guest bedroom where I slept. It was as if TV static had taken the smoky shape of a man. I knew I was not awake, but also not asleep. It slithered toward me, and I could do nothing. It crawled into my bed, and I could do nothing. It curled itself into a question mark around me, and I could do nothing. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled as it hissed in my ear, and we lay like that for hours. When I opened my eyes again, the bed was empty, and the guest room door was still locked. I jiggled the handle to be sure.

A few months later, in my studio apartment across town, the demon visited me again. Its pursuit felt unfair, as if all the miles and key-card-only doors should have kept it away. So I saged my apartment. I bought crystals. I tried to shake out the corners of my brain from which it had come with medication and meditation and was unsuccessful.


Aliens

It was New Year’s Eve, and I’d said too much. My friend and I were gin-drunk and talking about the mystery drones in New Jersey. The bodies around us were sweating and pulsing and loud, but we stood off to the side of the bar, indulging in conspiracies together that we couldn’t with others. Like popping a pimple, gross and necessary, a guilty pleasure.

The drones are manned by aliens, I laughed. I may be ridiculous, but I was also correct. I told her that I couldn’t talk about aliens for too long because if they knew I was thinking about them, they’d take it as an invitation to abduct me from my bed. They’d probe me. I said it like a joke, but we both knew it wasn’t. If anyone would understand my delusions, my neuroses, my obsessive-compulsions, I reasoned that it would be her.

Instead, she said, “Do we think that this is about rape?” She was so, so gentle about it. “Not that aliens aren’t real, because they are. But, do we think this may not be about that?”

I thought, it has been seven years.

I thought, sometimes whole days go by when I don’t think about it.

I thought, I am as good as I am ever going to get.

I clicked my tongue and gave her a sheepish smile that was mostly bared teeth. I don’t remember what I responded, but soon after, the clock turned over. People cheered. We threw back our drinks and walked out onto the knife’s edge of a night that could go either way.

In the morning, we would not talk about it. Our conversation was the type best left alone under drunk plausible deniability; we both could assume the other didn’t remember. And besides, I was fine. Later that night, I didn’t even worry about the aliens as we folded into her queen bed. I know they’ll only come when I’m alone.