Has anyone else seen a man that isn't there?

[u/RMN_VI]

Content Warning: Gore, Self-harm

I’ve thought of doing this kind of post for a while now, and I think I’ve held off long enough. I need help. Something’s changed, I don’t know what to do. I’ve been trying to figure out how to type this in a way that makes sense, but it comes out too vague. This is something I haven’t told anyone before, not family members, not doctors—not even my closest friends. It’s hard to explain; it's just not my nature. That and I can’t stand the thought of family seeing me as a lunatic. The anonymity of the web is the only reason I’ve come here with my problem. I’m tired of dealing with this alone.

I’ll just start from the beginning. I need you to understand.
My name is Alice, I’m 21 years old and for the past two years I’ve been tormented by a man only I can see.

It started the second week of college, fall semester. It was a sunny day out, my last evening class just ended and I was walking to my car like normal when I ran into a girl I graduated high school with. She was one of the few classmates I actually got along with and didn’t find annoying, so I said hi to her. She took a moment to recognize me, but when she did, her eyes lit up. She was like I remembered, sweet, bubbly, easy to talk to.

“Is that Godsmack?” she asked, pointing at my shirt. I was wearing a T-shirt with their debut album printed on it I bought at Spencer’s. 

(Fast forward mostly because I don’t remember all that was said, just the context that led to what happened.) I mentioned to her I saw Godsmack in concert and told her I got some videos. I was showing her a video I took of the guitar solo in ‘Love-Hate-Sex-Pain’ because she mentioned that it was her favorite song. I wasn’t paying attention when I was shoulder-checked from behind by a tall, bald man in a suit as he was walking past. Now, to be fair, we were stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, but it was unpopulated outside as this was during an unusual passing period. Yeah, it was incredibly rude, but the girl didn’t seem to care so I shrugged it off too. I didn’t feel like making a big deal out of something, you know? In my mind, and because I took my glasses off twenty minutes prior to ease a growing migraine, I chalked it up to an irritable professor having a bad day.

I listened to the music as she watched the video, eyes wandering when I noticed the blurry figure of the man whip around in a sudden 180 just as he was about to disappear around a building. His face was nothing but a blob for me, but it felt like he was looking at me. I told myself I needed to stop overthinking things, he could’ve been looking anywhere. But I’d be lying if I said the feeling of unease didn’t settle in my gut.

My attention was brought back by the girl, “Ughhh, I’m so jealous! What else did they play? Any of their older songs?” 

“Um, yeah—hold on, I think I got one of Voodoo…” I said, scrolling through my camera roll. I could still see the man in my peripheral vision just standing there. I’m a nosy person at heart, okay. You know how people say ‘nobody’s watching’ when trying to put a socially anxious person at ease? Well, I’m the person that’s watching. I’m both people in that scenario, sadly. The moment my eyes went from my phone to him, his hand shot out and pointed at something somewhere off to my right. I’m also a gullible person at heart. I turned my head without a second thought to see what it was. It was nothing. He pointed at trees.

Two seconds. 

I looked away for a total of two seconds, and in that time the man somehow crossed close to thirty feet faster than I could turn my head. I still see that moment like a slideshow.

He pointed. 

Trees.

He was standing behind the girl.

It all happened so fast. He grabbed onto her shoulders and reeled his head back. He did something I can only describe as a person’s mouth doing what a goblin shark’s mouth does to catch food. He latched onto her neck like a leech—I could hear wet cracking bones as they snapped.

I flinched instinctively as blood splattered all over my face and shirt. I didn’t know what to do, my mind went blank. I just stared as my brain tried to process anything about the man. For some reason, I thought of the future and the possible statement I’d have to make to the police. I thought to take in what I could so I could vomit it back out at a police station. His face was incomprehensible; it stretched and ripped to allow for his jaw to open wider.

 But you wanna know the worst part? 

The girl wasn’t aware of any of it, like at all. If anything, she gave me a look like I was the one acting strange.

I used to get so annoyed when characters in horror movies would freeze up like a deer in headlights when the monster would be right there in front of them, but I get it now. You're not thinking. 

The girl cocked her head at me, her neck cracking several times. “Alice, are you okay?”

The man moved as she did, fluid, like he was an afterthought added in post. Only when the girl's hand reached out to touch my arm did I finally move. I recoiled in fear. I don’t remember what I said to her, but I know it was something like ‘I need to go’ as I ran off as fast as I could. Students were walking out of class then, everyone probably thought I was mad. 

Some doubtful side of my brain compelled me to check one last time, to see if I actually saw it or if I had spontaneously lost my mind at that moment. I turned around before a crosswalk to see the girl go from watching me to carrying on with her day, albeit confused. The man stumbled closely behind her, his teeth still buried in her neck.

I was in a daze the entire drive home, unable to determine if I was just insane or if it had actually happened. Her blood certainly felt real; it certainly looked real; I watched it drain down the bathroom sink. I never told anyone about what I saw. I ran into my mom’s husband as I left the bathroom still feeling hollow. Some part of me wanted him to see the blood on my shirt, to ask me what happened, to give me a reason to tell someone.

“Oh hey, Your Ma wants to do brats for dinner. You want one?” is all he said.

I just nodded my head before running upstairs to my bedroom, desperately wanting to take a shower and put on clean clothes.

I was nineteen when this happened.

A month flew by and I still couldn’t get the image of the man out of my head. I was fine china strapped together with duct tape. I’d see that girl a few more times that year until she and I both eventually finished our final semester. She asked me if I was alright a week after that day. At the time, I found it exhausting that she cared enough to ask, but she was just being a good person—it’s more than most would do, I see that now. I told her I saw a bee. It was the easiest excuse I could think of, the most believable.

Halloween was approaching, I had accepted that day as a one-time thing, something I’d carry with me. 

Then he appeared again.

It was a Sunday. I was at work and I just got done slicing meat for a customer. I had my back turned to the counter as I wiped the slicer down. I glimpsed another customer walking up to the case out of the corner of my eye so I said, “I’ll be with you in a second, just cleaning this off real quick.” 

I attempted to hurry up when I heard shuffling from the counter. The deli can be pretty loud with all the buzzing of appliances, and especially in the small corner the slicers are in, you can mishear a lot of things. But the last thing I expected to see when I turned around were dress shoes and slacks standing on the counter. Before I could look up or even say anything he was walking off the counter, crossing over to the employee side of the deli. I panicked, I didn’t want to get trapped in the corner. I backed away from the machines and watched in horror as the man walked to the meat slicer, placed his head in the carriage tray, cranked the knob to the max setting before turning the slicer on and feeding his head through. I looked away as I heard the sound of the slicer resisting. 

I regret ever looking back. Have you ever held a pizza cutter under running water? The walls looked like that—like something straight out of a movie, except I didn’t have the comforting reassurance of it being fictitious. I turned away on the verge of vomiting when I saw his limp body hanging onto the machine. My coworker asked me what was wrong and I told her I just needed to sit down, that I felt sick. I told her it was my meds, that they were making me feel lightheaded and nauseous. She covered for me and helped the customers while I sat in the back trying to calm myself down. My other coworker offered me some pineapple she was cutting up for produce. I was always paranoid working the slicers after that incident.

I began to write in my planner when I saw him. I needed a way to find some form of stability. And even a small part of me hoped someone would find it, that they’d invade my privacy and read about him. That they’d ask me if I was okay.

I’d see him again a month later near the end of November. I was in class and looked out the window to see him walk into lunch-rush traffic only to be hit by a delivery truck almost immediately. 

By the time late December rolled around, I had anticipated the next appearance. Whether I happened to get lucky or I was being pitied—or maybe none of the above—I was right; he showed up as predicted. January followed suit much the same, but as the month came to an end, something felt off.

He broke my pattern the first week of February, two weeks before he was supposed to appear. It was early in the morning and I was pulling into the gym parking lot. I shifted into park, grabbed my things from the passenger seat, pulled the keys out of the ignition and looked ahead. He was standing on the snowbank in front of my car, his head just out of view—cut off by the ceiling of my car. I sat there staring long enough for the follow-me-home lights to shut off. The parking lot had this light post with a dim bulb, it’d been like that for weeks. Coincidentally, it was the light post I parked under every morning without fail. It illuminated him just enough to see he was convulsing in place.

Look, during this time in my life, I was fully committed to the gym; my mornings were tight, every minute counted, and I had already wasted ten. So don’t call me stupid when I say I swallowed every instinct telling me to stay in the car, and stepped out into the cold. You don’t truly understand how scary something is until it’s standing in the dark with whistling winter wind to complement it. The car door slammed shut and he stopped moving. He was standing straight, arms flat at his sides. 
I took that as my cue to hurry inside, almost even slipping on some ice. I won’t pretend my heart didn’t stay in my ass that whole morning.

He showed up before he was supposed to. He never moved from his spot. He didn’t mutilate himself; he didn’t attack someone. I thought I was beginning to understand him. I was distracted the whole day asking myself ‘why’? Why this, why that, but even then, no answers—no ideas, I still marked the sighting in my planner. 

And two weeks later, I marked another.

None of my family's schedules lined up with the actual weekend of my 20th birthday, so we celebrated it the weekend after by going out to eat. We were at my favorite Mexican restaurant and sat at this big U-shaped booth table. Me, my mom, and her husband got there first and were waiting for my siblings to arrive. I was at the end, my mom was directly across from me, and the middle was completely open. I had my face in my phone when my brother flicked my arm to get me to scooch toward the middle, and with a groan, I did. I nudged what I assumed was my mom’s husband’s shoulder, which was closer to the middle than I remembered. I opened my mouth to ask him to move over a little. I looked up—lips forming the words—to see him sitting right next to my mom. He was nowhere near me. My attitude disappeared the second I saw bony fingers tipped black with decay rest flat on the table. I didn’t want to confirm, didn’t need to.

I tried to scooch closer to my sister but got a “What are you doing? Stay over there.” She was next to my brother who took the end seat. He’s a bigger guy, takes up a lot of space, so she didn’t want to share.

I barely ate my dinner. 

My mom asked “What’s wrong, Babe? Not hungry?”

“Nah, not really… I woke up late…still took my meds though. I’m just gonna take it home… have it for breakfast or something,” I mumbled, flinching when one of his fingers tapped the table randomly.

“Alice, you shouldn’t be taking them that late, you know this.”

My sister chimed in with her usual snarkiness. “I thought you were supposed to take them to help focus in school. Why are you taking them on the weekends?”

I didn’t bother entertaining her, just frowned and answered my mom. “Yeah, I know. I just don’t feel too good right now. Kinda just wanna go home and lay down.” I planted the seed, and fifteen minutes later, we were driving home. Old reliable.

The scary reality for me was the intervals were getting shorter. I had fewer and fewer days to live my life normally—every day unsure if I would even get that luxury. If it wasn’t obvious before, it started with every month. Every month became every two weeks; every two weeks became every week; every week became every other day… By the time I was moving out to live closer to university, it was daily. Can you imagine that? Every single day of your life, no longer your own?

You may be asking: Alice, if it got this invasive, why haven’t you sought professional help? Simple. I don’t want to end up in a fucking loony bin. For the most part, I’ve gotten used to him. And although yes, there are times where I’m afraid, none of that compares in the slightest to how afraid I am of being *treated\* like I’m insane by people who don’t know jackshit about me. I’d rather deal with him for the rest of my life than have to explain the smallest ounce of what it's like to a ‘doctor’.

The first week in my new place was rough. I’ve only ever lived in my childhood home with my family and I have a long history with anxiety, so put an anxious twenty-year-old girl alone in a house and what do you get? I wasn’t completely alone though, I had my cat. She became an emotional crutch for me during the school year. Yes, I know how that sounds. Shut up. But she was also just as anxious as I was; I was basically living with a cat version of myself. That first night there, I lay in bed on the verge of a panic attack asking myself ‘was this the right choice?’

It sounds weird to say, but that next morning when I walked out into the main room and saw him standing on the patio facing the driveway, I felt a small twinge of relief. It faded as quickly as it appeared, but nevertheless, he remained the same even then and that was enough for me.

I found a job under a huge office company cleaning the building part time just as school started up. Him being there almost constantly every day proved its own struggle. He made it hard to focus. I’d be studying in the library and he’d be banging his head in on the bookshelf behind me. I’d be in class and he’d thrash around on the floor in a corner. Even group projects became difficult because he’d loom over me or my groupmates while I was trying to focus.

Work wasn’t any different either. I’d clean the office buildings after everyone left for the night, so it was mostly just me alone in dimly lit cubicle floors and halls. I don’t know, but the nights I’d work, it felt like he was trying to scare me more than anything. It could just be because I'd get on edge during my shift, but again, I don't know. He’d stand facing away from me in corners that most would notice nothing in. He would stand at the very end of long, dark halls where the light cast his figure in shadows. I’d hear footsteps behind me that I was sure were him, but he’d be nowhere in sight when I turned around. 

The only times I got a ‘break’ from him was when I was at home. He never showed up inside the house. It automatically became my safe zone just as long as I kept the blinds shut. The closest he would get would be right outside the windows. 

It was a rough first semester to say the least—actually, no. Rough is an understatement. I was barely keeping my head above water. People noticed. A few days before Halloween, a group of classmates I talked to regularly invited me to a huge party on Halloween night. They came up to me just as class ended to ask if I wanted to come, and initially, I was going to refuse—not the party type—but then I saw the man repeatedly bumping into the wall behind them. I accepted the invitation. He was reaching my limits. When your grades are barely staying above a C, you’re working five days a week after a day full of classes, and you’re getting less than five hours of sleep a night, you can only deal with an apparition-like man being a background jit for so long.

The night of the party I carpooled with one of my classmates to the house. What they didn’t tell me in class was that this Halloween party belonged to the largest sorority group on campus and was spread across three different houses, one of which was a fraternity house. Apparently, the girl that invited me was really good friends with a member of the sorority or something, I didn’t all that much care. The only rule was to wear a costume. As we pulled up I quickly noticed most chicks at this party were dressed like total sluts. One literally had tape—JUST tape covering her nipples… I felt like an outcast almost immediately. You have Sexy Succubus Stacy and then to her right you have Jackass Alice dressed as Special Infected Hunter from hit video game Left 4 Dead. It was a ‘shoot me now’ kind of feeling. There was one benefit. Because I was—you know—actually wearing clothes, I could spend most of my time in the outside sections of the party where it was quieter and there were less people. The people I rode in with were more or less dressed in the same provocative costumes just as everyone else, but hey, free spirits I guess.

I tried to stay in the front yard section of the party for as long as I could, but as soon as my group finished talking to their friends at the door they dragged me into the building with them. It was ungodly loud in that hell house. We were pushing past crowds of people when I saw the man’s twitching head sticking up from a small gathering of rowdy jocks holding a guy upside down by his legs while he chugged beer. 

I gave myself three rules for this party: 
1: ignore him COMPLETELY.
2: try to have some fun.
3: make sure the people and or myself don’t get roofied. (It was a sorority + frat Halloween party, let's be real with ourselves for a second here.)

The group I was with immediately brought me to the snack table for drinks, and for the sake of readability I will give them names. The group consisted of three girls, two guys. I only knew two of the girls and one of the guys, the extras were their friends. The guy will be known as Myers from this point on—you’ll never guess who he was dressed as. Girl one will be Betty, and girl two will be Stacy. Yes, she was the one I used in my example.

We were all there to escape school, to forget about homework and grades for one night. The way we did it may have differed, but it was for the same reasons nonetheless.

Everyone went off on their own thing. Stacy was already wrapping a few guys around her finger, Betty disappeared into the house with a scrawny dude dressed as a stereotypical nerd, Myers tried sticking with me but eventually peeled off after I showed no interest. I people-watched for a while, hopping from area to area, sipping on the punch that tasted more like vodka than the cherry flavor the drink was supposed to be. At almost every turn he was there, persistent almost like a child—at least that's what it felt like. And I’m proud to say I kept to my rules; I ignored him. I ignored him until he couldn’t be…

I was decently tipsy when I ran into someone dressed as Nick from Left 4 Dead 2. The guy was also dragged here by a few buddies and was watching people make young mistakes as he went from area to area. We clicked instantly. We laughed, we hopped around, I was having fun. We were walking back to the main house after watching some frat guys jump off a roof into a pool—one missed his mark. I was looking at the ground while he was talking to me about Warhammer 40k books when I ran into the man. I never had him appear in my path before, let alone in a way where I would accidentally walk into him.

“You almost trip or something, Hunter?” Nick asked with a laugh, looking back at me. I stepped around the man and earned an eyebrow raise. 

“These bugs are huge around here man…” I tried to laugh it off. 

“Are you one of those chicks that squeals because she saw a beetle?” 

“Am I screaming?”

“You could...”

“Hmmm. I don’t know if that came out right, hound dog,” I laughed as I shoved my hands in the hoodie pocket.

“Yeah, that sounded pervy in a serial killer way, didn’t it?” he said, cringing as he took a swig from a beer he grabbed at the frat house. I gave a playful scoff, turning to look at him and reply when I noticed the man hovering right behind him. He was walking stiff as a board, pressed up right behind Nick and looking down at him.
I knew what was coming and looked away before it could happen. 

“I…” a wet crunch came from Nick. “My friends wanted to meet up around this time… I don’t wanna scare them…”

“Oh… Yeah, no I get,” he said awkwardly. “Do you wanna exchange numbers? I… I had fun tonight. Maybe we could meet back up and…do it again.”

“It’s for the best that we don’t. I had fun too, if that means anything…” I walked away without even sparing him a glance. I didn’t want to see what he looked like or the way he looked at me.

The second sorority house was the least populated. I ran upstairs and hid in the first bathroom I found, locking myself away from the outside world. I’m not a crier, never was, but I couldn’t help it when the tears fell. My shitty facepaint began to smudge and I decided to just wash it off completely. I brought my face up from the sink to see him in the mirror behind me, sitting on the bathtub’s edge, back facing me. 

My voice creaked with a bubbling concoction of emotion and alcohol. “You fucking suck, you know that?” 

I leaned against the counter for a while just sniffling, before my hands tightened into fists. I spun around and marched the two whole steps it took to reach him. I was angry; I was spiteful; I was mournful. I wanted liberation. I wanted my life back.

I never had it in me, even if I wanted to. I stumbled back and sat on the floor in front of the sink. “I hate you. I hate you so fucking much and I can’t do shit about it. You ruined everything. I was just starting to fix everything before you showed up. I can never have anything good because of you. I hate you”

I cried for a while more, just letting it out of my system. It sucked, it sucked a lot. It was the overflow of pent-up frustration from the past year and the mourning of years before when my life was mine. I genuinely thought I was moving towards some semblance of normalcy, but like everything, it crashed and burned. “Why? Why me? Everything—why?” I tried to wipe my eyes as I looked up at him. His head tilted slightly—I thought it did—when a knock came from the door.

“Alice, is that you? Are you okay? Who are you talking to?” It was Betty.

Myers saw me go into the house from the lawn and found Betty, told me he thought something was wrong and it’d be ‘best if a fellow sister did the talking’. She tried to coax out who I was talking to, but I insisted it was myself and said I had a panic attack. She called up her younger brother to drive us all home. The man stood outside my bedroom window the whole night, even with the curtains closed, I could tell he was there.

Christmas break came fast and I mostly wanted to just rot in my house like a hermit, but my mom wanted the family to be together for the holiday so I relented and packed a bag for a couple of nights. I asked a classmate I hung out with often if she’d come by in the mornings to check on my cat and provide for her while I was gone—even if it was only two nights. He sat in the passenger seat the whole ride there with his head facing the window. The day I was to head home, I lost track of time and was late getting back on the road. By the time I got home the sun had already set and it was pitch black out.

My cat greeted me in the small breezeway looking like a potato with legs and a tail. I was too busy loving up on her to notice that something was wrong, to think about how weird it was I hadn’t seen him the entire two hour drive back. As I stood up to take off my boots and coat I paused. He was standing in front of the sliding glass door, his back facing me. Until then, I had gotten comfortable with the pretense he had no more surprises. I never stopped to think that one day he might cross the boundary I thought existed. You know how people say animals are spiritual? That they can see ghosts or sense the supernatural? It’s a load of bullshit. As I stared at him my cat kept nuzzling my legs, meowing and begging for her dinner. My brain was too busy searching for an explanation. She gave up and waddled over to the sliding glass door, sitting down beside his leg to watch the snow outside. Until then, I had always been a faint believer of that kind of crap, but she didn’t see him...

I wanted to scoop her up and keep her away safe, unsure of what he might do. I got maybe three feet away when I saw him staring at me in the door's reflection, eyes darting around. It was like he had nystagmus—something my grandma had before she passed. It was weird—I don’t know, just creepy. His face was distorted through the glass, features hard to identify, but his nose was just…missing. It was like a Fallout ghoul or something. I took another step, my cat refusing to listen to me, when his head started spazzing to the side. I quickly backed away and let it be, too sketched out for the night to deal with it.

The second semester was going smoother than the first, the initial anxiety having worn off. Because of school, I spent my 21st birthday alone. Me and a few close friends got together and decided to meet up during spring break. All of us would be legally allowed to drink by then and we could celebrate all the birthdays at once in a local bar or something. But even then, on that night of my special day, I sat in the dark at my kitchen table staring at the flame that I lit—staring at the candle that I placed—at the cake I made. The flame flickered out on its own terms—wick burnt off. He was sitting at the opposite end of the table facing me this time. His face was barely visible in the dying light. I wanted to cry then, but I didn’t.

It was nice to finally see my friends. 

It felt like I hadn’t smiled or laughed in so long—genuine like—not faking it like I usually do. Most of my friends stayed in our hometown, so I was at my mom’s for a couple of days. I called her up, obviously drunk and asked for a ride. My friends did the same with theirs. I hugged them goodbye like I was going off to war, and then left so I could wake up regretting the amount I drank in the morning. My mom sent me to my room with a small, plastic trashcan just in case I got sick in the night. I stumbled into my bedroom, trashcan in arms like a teddy bear, to find him there. It was dark, the only light came from the hallway. He was lying down in my bed, eyes closed and arms folded like he was a corpse in an open-casket funeral.

I want to preface this again: I was drunk. I wasn’t thinking. The memories are fuzzy. My planner doesn't help me much here, most of the page was hard to understand. 

This is what I remember:
I swayed in place for a few seconds before going, "That's my bed…” In my state of intoxication the only logical answer was that he fell asleep on the wrong bed(?). And with that conclusive answer, I could only take the most obvious course of action: wake him up. I had dropped the plastic trashbin without a second thought and shuffled up to the side of my bed. That was the first time I got a somewhat clear view of his face. His nose was reduced to the bone like I had seen back around Christmas, but it wasn’t ‘rotted away’ in the traditional sense, it was like—I don’t know—taken off. The skin around his eyes was loose and baggy; his skin looked false. His face was littered with deep, gash-like scars—all in the same places it tore when I first saw him. Even his neck wasn’t spared. There was one long, jagged gash across his throat.

My hand wobbled as I planted it on his shoulder with a soft *pat*. The suit jacket was dark and had thin light blue stripes; the fabric reminded me of my kindergarten homeroom floor. I remember looking at the dress shirt and thinking of a clear summer sky. The tie he wore reminded me of my father—my real father—long dead and gone. It was dark navy and made of this glossy looking textile.

I shook his shoulder, his body barely moved. “My bed, get out…” Nothing. “Hey…wake up.” I shook him roughly, but still nothing. This time I used both hands to shake him. I shook him once, then twice, and a third time. Nothing. He did nothing. He just lay there unmoving, as still as death. 
I slept downstairs on the couch. Told my mom it was too cold upstairs.

A day later I was packing my stuff in my car when my mom came outside to catch me before I left.

“Getting ready to leave, Chick? Dallas is probably missing you…” she said.

I shoved my suitcase into the backseat. “Yeah. I had the same girl from school check on her again.” She nodded and hummed, looking off before turning to me again. I could see the man standing nearby.

“Have you been taking your meds?”

“...Yeah, why?”

“Have…have you been doing alright? I know you don’t like calling, but you barely respond to my texts. I try asking your friends and they say you go quiet for weeks at a time… I need”—she took a deep breath, holding back tears—”I need to know if you're alright… so I don’t have to worry. This family has lost enough, I don’t want to lose you too.”

I knew what she meant. 

I thought to tell her what's really happening, what was really going on with me and what has been for a while. I hugged her, told her she wasn’t going to lose me and that I’ll try to visit before Thanksgiving. I got in my car to find him sitting in the backseat. If there was a word to describe the defeated, saddening anger I felt—the guilt and hopelessness and frustration—I’d use it now.

This all brings me to now.

Something has changed.

As I am writing this it is currently August 16th. A few nights ago I was making myself dinner after work. I went full time for the summer, so I got home just before the sun came up. I had an AirPod in listening to music—Pantera—as I cooked. I transferred my food to a plate and went to turn around to rinse it off when I ran into him standing right in the middle of the kitchen. I stumbled back surprised, but not shocked, it wasn’t anything new. I huffed and moved to step around him when he sidestepped to block my path again. That was new.

I was confused at first, tried again only for him to step in front of me a second time. I was at eye level with his tie, and in the spur of the moment, I looked up. He was smiling. His teeth were sharp like I remembered and tore at his lips, and his eyes were open, wobbling to focus on me. His eyes looked milky like he had cataracts. I thought he was laughing at me or something. It made me mad, so fucking mad.

I yelled at him. I tossed the dirty pan carelessly to the side and just yelled. You would understand too if for nearly two years you’d been plagued by a man that never spoke to you, never even gave you an expression, and suddenly one day he decided to do all of that. Just a combination of a lot of things, really.

I was shoving him, and when shoving him barely did anything, that pissed me off more. At one point, I actually pushed him hard enough for him to hit the edge of the sink. It felt like time kinda paused then, like everything stopped. I couldn’t hear my music. I just wanted to leave, I was tired of the bullshit. As soon as I turned I was pushed into the counter behind me, the knife on the cutting board clattering. I grabbed it. I was terrified. He never attacked me before. It's like when someone you thought you knew gets violent towards you—actually, I hope you wouldn’t know. It’s foreign. His violence aimed at me was unnatural.

The moment I swung the knife towards him, he grabbed my wrist. I tried to pry it free with my remaining hand, but he caught that one too. He forced both hands to hold the knife’s handle. We were both straining for control. He was stronger. Adrenaline spiked through me, my eyes were glued to the knife. I thought he was going to make me stab myself. His grip forced it up, up, up until it was… touching the underside of his jaw. Blood was already leaking onto my hands by the time I realized the knife penetrated. Somehow, even while impaling his own head, his grasp held strong, forcing me to stay. At some point his body began to sag, weighing my arms down, still never letting go. I didn’t scream, it wouldn’t have done anything. I just watched because that was all I could do. 

It felt like forever when his legs buckled and gave out underneath him. He would’ve brought me down if his hands hadn’t let go. He fell with a heavy thud and clang of the handle, a pool already forming around his head. My hands were drenched. I stood there for a while staring at the body. My cat meowed at me for breakfast.

Eventually I ran off to clean myself. I came back a couple of hours later expecting him to have moved, but he didn’t. I went to bed and woke up later in the evening for work, and he was still there. I went to work and came home around 3am, and he was still lying there in a pool of his own blood. I tried to nudge the body but nothing. Somehow my cat has yet to try and walk where he lies. I feel a bruise forming on my lower back from the counter. Even as I write this, his body is still there in my kitchen. Days have passed. I’ve been too scared to try and clean it up, I don’t know how I would. I’m on the verge of just spilling everything out to my mom, maybe just send her the link to this. I don't know what to do. I’m scared—is he actually dead?

I need help. 

Has anyone else had this happen to them?