I have a cigarette loaded. It’s in the chamber. I want to smoke. My life is clean and sleek, all the dirt is outside. I scrub my hands with a ground up walnut soap that gets the grime, but there’s some stuck underneath my calluses I can never get to. I sweat and I think all day, my bed has been harder to get out of recently. Really recently I started to believe in demons more, the real ones. I kind of thought of them as an idea, like how an idea can get inside you, push all your neurons to one place and hold the blood and attention there. But now I think there are some ideas that breathe, I think somethings have access to our thoughts.
If it was Tuesday, a normal Tuesday I wouldn’t say anything. But I went to that cathedral, you know the one off Green Street. I talked to the priest, then there was the ceremony and I was dipped in holy water, whispered poetry and oaths. Then it came after, it screamed in my ear every time I looked at anything beautiful or miraculous. I realized my mind isn’t all mine. Exhaustion and chaos crept in. Horrible dreams too, something always sitting to the right, and when I asked it what it was it would rise up out of the floor like a tree expending the growth of its whole life in a moment. And my body ached, I could feel something watching me, trying to burrow into the back of my skull.
Thirty days. It lasted thirty days. Thought maybe I’d gone insane, no one would put it past me. I’ve always been a little strange. But I did pray, I prayed a lot. And in the midst of the blood I felt calm when I did. Then on my patio while looking at the patchy bullet holed clouds I prayed again and it fell off, or away, I’m not sure. A thing left. It was just me again.
I was paranoid for a week after, checking my mind like one would check closets for ghosts. If you had asked me if I believed in this stuff before I probably would have said yes, but the yes has a different texture after you’ve felt something trying to push through your skin.
Now to my priest this sounds blisteringly obvious, or to my agnostic friends I sound mad. But I’m not mad, and I’m certainly not agnostic, I know who I am and what I saw. I think there is something that’s really upset it can’t eat me.
I have this theory that writers and poets have some extra goosebumps that are attuned to this stuff, we operate in the ecosystem of living, breathing words, so maybe we brush shoulders with angels and demons on their commutes into their little celestial or infernal offices.