The Visitor

sophia sorrentino | Fall 2021

She’s been following me home from work again recently. I told Ben, well I tried to tell Ben, I promise I did, but he just asked if I had taken my pills. He doesn’t believe me when I tell him I do. He doesn’t believe me about anything these days.

She only visits when she knows I’m alone. When she can feel it. Like my despair has bubbled over and wafted up to where she stays, a poorly constructed stew spiked with nostalgia calling her to come home.  She comes when she knows he’ll be going. Takes her shift in bearing witness to my sorrow. She doesn’t mention him, doesn’t need to, but I know she despises his presence. I can sense it in the way she talks, the way she sits and looks at me and occupies the space she borrows. I can feel it too, her ruthlessness seeping in where my seams have begun to loosen.

She’ll never admit it, but I know she’s there, feeding me, stuffing herself down my throat. I feel her everywhere again. I can’t escape her eyes; they follow me no matter where I hide. I keep my blinds firmly shut, my curtains drawn, doors locked, and still her eyes sinch and squeeze and scrape under the door and find their way in. They find me as I put my socks on in the morning, at the dining table I now occupy alone, sticking to the goosebumps on my shoulder in the shower. She leaves me gifts too: a spare sock on my dresser, an earring in his laundry, the smell of flowers under my pillow.

She doesn’t need to leave me messages, doesn’t need to convince me. I know my ends already: whatever she wants is hers. I want her too, I crave it deep in my bones down to my core, this is how it was always meant to be. I miss the days I would dread her visits. The days I would fight her and resist. When I would be determined to ignore her, to make her small. I give in now and I know what I need to do. I give her what she wants, what she has always wanted. 

I stand before my bed, body hot where it normally shivers. My body sears the metal blade where they touch, my shaky hand tapping it against my thigh. I let her anger drive me, her visceral hate. She feels what I never allowed myself to. What I release completely as the knife comes down and lodges itself below his stomach. I feel her take me over, I let her fill me up and boil my blood. I let myself give into her, I relish in it.  I become more of her than I have ever been of myself. Under the thick red spray we are baptized together.