The Houseguest

There’s a man living in my house. I’m not sure how he got here, but he tells me he’s my boyfriend. I just woke up one day to him bringing me a cup of tea. My wardrobe rearranged to fit his shirts and his posters hung on the wall. There were photos of us together, from a date I never went on, propped on the bedside table that he claimed, like he’d always lived here. He had a grin that split his face ear to ear as he kissed me on the cheek and asked me how I slept.

Things feel different since he turned up, my head is quieter like I’m wrapped in a thick quilt and people tell me this is a good thing. It’s almost a relief to have someone to step in and make decisions for me, for us. He says he just wants to be there for me, make me happier. Maybe that was all I needed, a knight in shining armour to save me from myself. All that worrying over the future for nothing, he’s more than happy to guide me there. There are still days I can’t get out of bed. Days where I look in a mirror and don’t recognise the face that looks back at me but he kindly pretends not to notice and we soon fall into our own pattern.

My mum’s crazy about him. Says I’ve never seemed so happy, practically glowing. But she’s said all this before and I’m never sure I believe her. She didn’t seem to question his sudden appearance in my life. I try to tell her, to explain how we didn’t meet, but it just bounces right off. She tells me none of this matters when you’ve found the one, these doubts are normal and that it’s clear how much he loves me. To try to relax and not overthink things for once.

Our first anniversary comes before I know it. I feel like someone’s lent on the fast forward button of my life. He buys me a necklace. It’s an ugly heavy thing. Cheap metal in the shape of a heart with an engraving of a sickly sweet declaration of love. He’s so, so proud of himself that I sometimes wonder if he sees the same thing I do when he looks at it. He puts it around my neck and I feel its weight settle on me. It feels too tight and I am constantly aware of the chain when I wear it. He looks so happy. I try to remind myself to smile back. To remember that I’m lucky to have someone who cares so much. How much worse it could be.

I think less about how we met these days. He doesn’t like to talk about it so we don’t. But things are going well I think. Everyone keeps telling me how good he is for me. Their soft pitying smiles, like I really needed this. Needed someone to pull me out of the ‘funk’ I’d been in. Whenever I try to talk about the hard days he just tells me I’m perfect. Which I don’t believe. Not because I’m unlovable but because no one can be and I wish he’d see me as I am. Though I never manage to find the right words to make him understand and the conversation always ends in tears.

I hate when I upset him, which is a more common occurrence than I’d like. I cross lines I didn’t realise were there as I stumble through my days. I’m always too loud or quiet. I don’t laugh enough or too much and always at the wrong times. I am never soft or easy. I’m always tired. He tells me it doesn’t matter though. It might if I was someone else, someone less special to him, but I’m not — I’m his girlfriend. So I’m given the second, third, fifth chance and try not to let him down.

Increasingly my skin feels wrong. Like my insides were made in a different shape. I’m not sure I remember what I was doing before we met now. I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter as we plan our future together. Somewhere deep inside a voice in my head is holding the same scream that started the day he moved in, though I manage to push it down most days. Anniversaries have slid past me and I feel like I can never quite get a grip on my present. I could do so much worse. I deserve so much worse. The depression is bad again and I can tell how hard it is for him. He hates to see me like this. Every time things get harder I think he’ll leave and maybe some small part of me hopes he will. I’m finding It difficult to keep up my side of the charade, to pretend I ever asked him to be here with me. My skin has started to shrink away from his touch. It hurts him when he notices this so I work harder to hide it. I feel like I’m falling endlessly.

I cry myself to sleep wishing I was better for him.

I never worked out what finally exorcised him from my life. At that point I hardly feel like a person any more so maybe there was simply nothing left to give. He didn’t  break up with me, he was simply gone one day, my flat returned to its original state as if he was never there. I’ve lost track of how long we were together or if any time has passed at all. A small part of me is scared I will simply cease to exist without his presence. The last scrap of my soul will float away with my sanity and I wonder if this would be a bad thing.

It doesn’t though and instead I sit on my bed and stare at the place our photo used to be. I sit there long enough for my legs to fall asleep. Slowly letting the pins and needles spread through me as blood vessels and nerves scream at me to move. All the feeling rushes back into my body at once.

I don’t know what to make of my haunting. Which is how I think of him now. For a long time I thought I deserved it, that he was summoned from some dark and lonely corner of my brain. Even now I still find it hard to capture what our life was like together. I’d like to say there were no omens, no curses, no ways to ward him off but I’m not sure I’d have seen the signs either way. It seems silly to imagine him draining something from me, when I had so little to take when he appeared. I was never a good fit for him, no matter how hard he tried. So sometimes it’s comforting to tell myself that I was the problem, that I brought out the worst, that I invited him in.

Mostly though, I just try not to think about who’s house he might be living in now.