You try to hide your face behind those curly curtains of hair, caked with crusty ripples of blood, but you’re too clumsy; shrieking metal alligators shear your bangs, silver brackets pinging around your feet. Shame contorts your complexion, a lump of scabby clay under a putrid sun, and you wither like a weed, drooping yourself into inky darkness. Your jagged footsteps thump towards me like an irregular heartbeat, echoing your approach. Even in the crowded high school hallway, the staggered drum finds no ears but mine. The pounding of your feet, the hungry clatter of your claws reverberates like a migraine between my temples, driving me ever closer to the edge of insanity. You’re a phantom following everywhere I go, emanating your aura of decay and streaking crimson in your wake.
You weren’t always like this, the horror movie monster haunting me today. As a kid, it was kind of like having an imaginary friend. Adults chuckled and nodded condescendingly whenever I mentioned the murky little forest sprite bouncing after me on the playground or breathing down my neck in the hallway. I always suspected that nobody could see you, like when the teacher didn’t say your name for attendance or when no one passed you the magenta crayon you’d been gazing at, mesmerized. At first, it only puzzled me, but as I grew older and the coincidences surpassed logic, the sight of your gaunt, malnourished frame sent shudders through my kid body. After a while, I stopped telling everyone about your hands; I knew they’d never believe me.
We grew up tall together, like two great redwoods joined at the roots, but as your height surpassed even mine, your terrible shadow crept over me like ice. It seemed with every inch I grew, you towered by nearly three. When I started seeing little wispy hairs poking out above my lip, you got twitchier, and the leather threads of your composure began to loosen. You festered from a quiet shadow trailing after me in school to a slumping, groaning scarecrow flinging yourself in clanging fits against the lockers as you battled ferociously with whatever demon was tearing you up from the inside. I bit back the sting of tears; your horrifying tantrums of ragdoll agony bled in my eyes only. Not long after, on one October day in seventh grade chorus class, you hurt me for the very first time.
Just being in that room of white brick used to scurry my heart faster by about a dozen paces or so. Those rising tiers of desks, those little pinprick holes pocketing the walls from floor to ceiling, meant I had to sing, and the silent indifference of the other baritones promised that my voice would be singled out from the rest. Needless to say, as I squeaked out solo lyrics in verses intended to be shared evenly, your eerie presence over my shoulder was not the only thing blinding me in surges of rage and misery. It was when that final, sheepish baseball cap dipped his head and refused to utter another note that I heard my scratchy voice bleating totally alone, and a white-hot lash of pain ripped a chunk of skin from my neck.
In the moment, the scarring was cathartic, as if you were simply letting the overheated air out of a bursting balloon, but as trickles of wet juice found my skin, the icy truth of your power sunk into my gut. My scarlet fingernails were enough to convince the others that I was the culprit, but the floppy disk of epidermis crushed in your dripping stapler hand cemented my fears in steely fact.
From then on, your erratic moods waxed and waned, unnerving me at your best and maiming me at your worst. You had signs, like the jitter of your head or the raucous wringing of your silver-plated wrists, that clued me in when the invisible rats were digging in your skin. Sometimes, I never saw you coming, like when you crouched under the grand piano and nipped at my thighs in the middle of a finger exercise. The greatest mutilation, however, you inflicted upon yourself: a row of rusty staples clamping your lips shut in a rotting, purple pucker.
I’ve tried killing you, cutting the clinking chains binding us together and putting us both out of our misery, but you’re surprisingly nimble when I slice at you with the serrated kitchen knife. You’re a spider, countering every attack with a chilling dexterity that makes the cumbersome tools dangling at your sides appear weightless. As steel hisses against steel, your shaggy resemblance to an arachnid makes my skin crawl. Your thick oily locks taunt me like abyssal tentacles as you dance around, whipping at me and threatening to pull me into hell.
Ultimately, you elude me, and a part of me is almost grateful. To end you now would be to cut away at more pieces of myself, to melt my warped reflection until we both crumble like twin skeletons to the floor. I want to believe you’re here for a reason, that the universe bound us together to punish me or teach me a valuable lesson, and there are moments I nearly feel sorry for you. Neither of us asked for this torture, and every doom desire shooting through my head brings a pang of empathetic guilt. We are binary stars, circling each other in chaotic orbit as we hurtle through space, tethered by something stronger than the force of gravity. So, I’ll live with your shadow as I search for meaning in your existence, but only time will tell when you finally act on that urge itching away at you, to fit my lips between your cold, silver mandibles and bore my mouth shut, silencing me for the rest of our welded lives.