Help:Editing

My psychologist told me writing things down can help me work through my trauma. So here I am. I'm a young woman there is a history of mental illness in my family, but nothing that would induce hallucinations like what I've seen. My hands haven't been steady since... well you'll have to forgive any mistakes. I don't particularly care if anyone believes me. I just need to say this and I'll go back to being quiet.

I can't remember when I started seeing them. A flicker when I closed my eyes before falling asleep. A barely there whisper of my name I wasn't even sure I heard as I was just about to doze off. A feeling of being closely watched or followed when I was alone. I told myself that these things were normal, just figments of my anxiety and imagination.

You know that falling or tripping sensation you get when you're just about to fall asleep and your reflexes wake you up again? Some people believe that when that feeling occurs your soul steps out of your body for a moment. I think around the time I turned 20 I started tripping in my sleep. I thought nothing of it, I was just having a weird dream of watching myself sleep from the corner of my own bedroom or from directly above my body. For a few weeks I'd have these strange sort of self surveillance sessions almost on a nightly basis.

Then these... creatures  began showing up. As I said before, just flashes on the edges of my periphery as I was just drifting off. The pale squatting woman with the wide-brimmed leopard print hat is quiet. The not-cat can't enter my room with his long, spidery legs so he just watches with beady little eyes blocking the doorway. The thing that stands outside my window is noisy, with large jagged teeth and no lower jaw always peering nosily inside over my windowsill. The three-eyed beast is also loud and angry and thankfully only shows up rarely. A little gnome-like thing in a tattered dress shuffles along the edges of my bed peering over at me its gaping toothy maw looking ready to snap a misplaced hand directly off and makes it difficult to go to sleep at night.

 Albeit unsettling none of these things exactly terrified me. I used to take pride in my ability to think logically but as you might be able to tell my idea of reality has been almost completely obliterated. These little annoyances didn't terrify me, but they brought something bigger that did.

 I don't know Her name. I don't know where She came from I just know She's always here. I've never actually seen Her but for some reason I know what She looks like. Her face flashes in my mind like a bad memory whenever I feel Her breath on the back of my neck. Her teeth are so long. Her hair is wiry, long and filthy It sticks in nearly every direction. Her skin is is the color of an old corpses. Her face is long and narrow, just enough to look inhuman. Her face is wrinkled and sunken and her bulbous black eyes never blink or waver. Her fingers are long, I can feel them touch my hair sometimes.

 The first time I felt Her near me I had stepped out of the shower. Needless to say that I hurried back to my bedroom slamming the door behind me in a futile attempt to escape this new presence. I'd always been relatively lucky, not with things like winning prizes, but just small, trivial choices that led to me avoiding some pretty huge disasters.

 I wouldn't be here if that hadn't changed. Small things started happening. I'd trip and fall running after a bus that hadn't seen me at the stop in the pre-dawn hours of a mid-winter day skinning two knuckles. Or I'd just happen to have three customers yell at me angry over some misfortune of theirs that honestly had no real outlet besides fixing the fucking problem themselves in a day. I'd tell myself it was all in my head. That I was just having a bad week. But a bad week turned into a bad month, a month turned into two, then three, then four.

 Instead of ignoring it I had no choice but to try to fix it. I went to the only place it would make sense to go in search of information. The internet. I learned terms like astral projection, emanationism.... Demonic possession. Things started happening around my house. Something I set down a minute ago would be gone the next. I'd hear loud bangs from another room but when I'd run over everything would look normal. I told my friend who latched onto it as an interesting topic for a little while but never really believed what I told her. I began to withdraw. Staying on my own as often as I could. While still going to work. I hardly slept, I hardly could and I certainly can't now.

 She'd whisper to me in my sleep. She wouldn't kill the friends I'd see in my dreams but she made sure that I knew that she could.

 The day I started looking for help started off normally. I got out of bed. I was going with my dad to look at an apartment I was thinking about moving into, he wanted to come along to make sure that I didn't get screwed over. I said goodbye to my mother and kissed my pug on the head before I left.

 Dad didn't approve of the apartment, he and I were talking over his standard of safety as I let my dog out into the back yard. My mother was babbling on about something, most likely repeating what my father had said about the apartment when I saw my dog collapse. I'm an only child. My father and I have a complicated past with his anxiety and anger issues and I had long lost respect for the idiotically optimistic drunk my mother had become. So please understand that my dogs are like the siblings I never had.

 His front feet slid out in front of him oddly, and it didn't seem like his back legs were working at all. I ran as fast as I could to my dog's side. He was lying there, seizing in the snow, shit, and piss that had accumulated in the back yard over the winter. It almost looked like he was stretching, but his eyes were wide in fear and it broke my fucking heart. I picked him up, he was as stiff as a board and breathing so hard I was afraid that he was going to have an asthma attack. My dad ran out to the porch where I laid my dog. Buck had gone limp and he was breathing harder than ever, and then it just stopped.

 He just died.

 After I was done with my crying I realized that this was a warning. She wanted me to stay in this house. For whatever reason she wanted me there with her in my mother's basement. She wanted me to wallow in these negative emotions and stagnate. She wanted me to rot like her.

 I fought and I was wrong to.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> I burned sage, but that only made her angry. She left bruises and scratches all over my skin that night. I talked to a deacon at the Catholic school I used to go to and even though I have long described my religious beliefs as agnostic I prayed with him and accepted the blessing. All the next day I felt but couldn't see the source of searing pain all over my skin. The pain was especially excruciating where the deacon had anointed me with oil as if he had dabbed sulfuric acid there instead.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> I had began wearing a rosary that had belonged to my great grandmother as well as my grandfathers old dog tags that held a medallion of St. Christopher. In the middle of the night I was woken from a rare hour of sleep coughing and retching. It was after another few seconds when I coughed up a little bit of blood and twisted jagged fragments of the crucifix. I searched for the dogtags trying to ignore the new aches and pains that made moving difficult.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> I tried to climb out of bed and up the stairs only to slump against the wall feeling like screaming with the pain in my lower stomach. My mother was sent into a panic thinking that I was suffering from appendicitis or something and rushed me to the hospital. They put me through an MRI scan and I found the medallions... They were.... they were pushed... They had been forced up there so hard that they had fractured the small bone that breaks when a woman gives birth. They were just twisted fragments, but I recognized the ball bead link chain they had been on sitting there so innocently for a reason far from innocent.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> I gave up after that. The way my parents looked at me... Doubt, shame, resentment, disgust I saw all of those in their gazes whether they actually felt those things towards me or not. A month later I had been fired. I used to be a very level-headed person, but this woman's attitude just sent me over the edge. I don't know how I knew about it. I don't know why I taunted her about it. I just whispered to her about her dead uncle, how he missed her and their... quality time together ever since he had passed away.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> I was home alone one afternoon, staring at the block of knives on the kitchen counter. The big one was looking pretty friendly to be honest. I pulled it out thinking about introducing it to my left wrist.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> My mother came home five minutes later, apparently not having any more patients for the day and had decided to come home. My poor mother found me sprawled across the floor a single slice down the inside of my forearm.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> Her curse brought that tiny incidence of 'good' luck and She saved my life.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in"> She doesn't want me telling you about this. But every day I feel her push me out a little more. I'm afraid to fall asleep because I don't want to leave my body again in case she takes it. I can feel her, pressing on my back. Squeezing the air out of my lungs. I can smell her breath. She'll take something else precious from me tonight for this. But I needed to tell someone before I lose to Her. If this is the last anyone hears from me. I want to say I'm sorry and I love you mom and I forgive you dad.