"I asked chatgpt-" okay??? well I itch, all the time deep beneath the skin where the bone sits enshrined in flesh, I feel it. Something not moving but that wants to move, wants to be free. It itches and I don't think I want it. I don't know what to do. You can't help me, I don't think so at least but whatever it is that calls to me, that wants me for its own, it hates you, it hates what you are and what you do and if it hates you then maybe you can help me. If I wanted to be helped. I don't know if I do, you must understand it sings so sweetly and I need it but I am afraid. It isn't right and I need help, I need it to be seen to be seen and the cold light of knowledge is an athama to the things that crawl and slither and swarm in the corners and the cracks and the pitted holes of the hive. You can't see it of course, it isn't real not like you or I are real, it's more of an everywhere. A feeling.
Are you familiar with trypophobia? That disgusted fear of holes, irregular honeycombed holes makes you feel that itch in the back of your mind like the holes are there too in your own brain, rotten and hollow and swarming. Is that real? I'm sorry I know I'm meant to be telling you what happened, what brought me to this place, this place of books and learning, of sight and beholding, I'm sorry. I should. I will. I- I haven't slept in some time. I can't sleep. My dreams are crawling and many legged, not just slithering and burrowing, though it is the burrowing that draws me. They always sing that song of flesh. I hope you will forgive me for such a rambling story. I hope you will forgive me for a great many things. As it may be I do worse, I have that feeling, that instinct that squirms through your belly there will be great violence done here. And I bleed into that violence. Do you know, I wonder, as I watch you sitting there through the glass. Eating a sandwich. Do you know where you are? You called me dear. “have a seat, dear“, “you can write it down, dear”, “take as much time as you need, dear”. Can you truly know the danger you are in?
There is a wasps nest in my attic. A fat, sprawling thing that crouches in the shadowed corner. It thrums with life and malice. I could sit there for hours watching the swirls of pulp and paper on its surface. I have done. It is not the patterns that enthrall me, I'm not one of those fools chasing fractals, no, it's what sings behind them. sings that I am beautiful. sings that I am a home. that I can be fully consumed by what loves me. I don't know how long the nest has been there. it's not even my house, I just live there. some sweaty old man thinks he owns it taking money for my presence as though it will save him. I used to worry about it you know, I remember before the dreams I would spend so long worrying about that money, about how I could afford to live there. Now I know that whatever the old man thinks, as he passes about the house with brow crinkled and mouth puckered in disapproval, it is not his. It has a thousand truer owners who shift and live and sing within the very walls of the building. He does not even know about the wasps nest. I wonder how long he has not known, how many years it has been there. Have you ever heard of the phillaerial worm? Mosquitoes gift it with their kiss, and it grows and grows. It stops water moving round the human body right, makes limbs and bellies swell and sag with fluid. Now when I look at that fat, sweaty, sack I think about it, and the voice sings of showing him what a real parasite can do. How many months has it been like this? Was there a time before? There must have been, I remember a life that was not itching, not fear, not nectar-sweet song. I had a job. I sold crystals. They were clean, and sharp and bright and they did not sing to me, though I sometimes said they did. We would sell the stones to smiling young couples with color in their hair. I remember, before I found the nest someone new came. His name was Oliver and he would look at me so strangely, not with lust, or affection or contempt, but with sadness. Such a deep sadness. And once with fear. It didn't matter because no one in the shop wanted to hear about the ants below it, I tried to tell them, to explain but they did not care, the pretty young things complained, and I left. That was when I still called myself a witch. Witter and paganism I would spend my weekends at rituals by the Thames. I wanted something beyond myself but could not stomach the priest or the imam or punjari of the churches, I knew better. I knew that it was not so simple as to call out to well-trodden gods. I never felt from my rituals anything except exhaustion and pride. I thought that those were my spiritual raptures. I wish, deep inside below the itch, that they were still my raptures. I have touched something now, though, that all my talk of laylines and mother goddesses could never have prepared me for. It is not a god or if it is then it is a dead god, decayed and clammy corpse flesh brimming with writhing grave worms.
When did I first hear it? It wasn't the nest, I'm sure of that I never went in the attic it was locked and I didn't have a key. I spent a day sawing through the padlock with an old hacksaw, my hands were blistered by the end. Why would I have done that if I didn't know what I would find? The face of the one who sang to me dwelling within the hidden darkness above me. I had seen no wasps. I know I hadn't. There are no wasps in the nest. So how else would I have known that I needed to be there, to be in the dark with it, if had not already been singing to me. No, that's not right the nest does not sing to me, it is simply the face. Not the whole face, for the whole of the hive is infinite, an unending plane of wriggling forms swarming in and out of the distended pores and honeycombed flesh. The nest is nothing but paper. Was it the spiders? There were webs in the corners around the entryway into the attic. I would watch them scurry and disappear in between the wooden boards. "Where are you going little spiders?" I would think. What are you seeing in the dark? Is it food? Prey? Predators? I wondered if it was the spiders that made the gentle buzzing song but it was not. Webs have a song as well of course, but it is not the song of the hive.
I used to pick at my skin. It was a compulsion. I would spend hours in the bathroom staring as close as I could get to my face in the mirror, searching for darkened pores to squeeze and watch the congealed oil worm it's way out of my skin, often I would end with swollen red marks where it had become inflamed with irritation or infection. Did I hear the song then? Was it when I was a child, such a clear memory of a classmate telling me a blackhead was a hole in my face, and if I didn't keep it clean it would grow and rot, did I hear it then? As that image lodged in my mind forever. Or was it last year, passing by a strip of green they call a park near my house after the rain, and watching a hundred worms crawl and squirm to the surface. Perhaps I've always heard it. Perhaps the itch has always been the real me, and it was the happy smiling Jane who called herself a witch and drank wine in the park when it was sunny, maybe it was her, who was the maddened illusion that hides the sick squirming reality of what I am. Of what we all are, when you strip away the pretense that there is more to a person than a warm wet habitat for the billion crawling things that need a home. That love us, in their way. I need to think, to clear my head, to try and remember, but remember what? I was lonely before I know that. I had friends at least I used to. But I lost them or, they lost me. Why was it? I remember shouting, recriminations and I was abandoned. No idea why, the memories are a blur. I do remember that they called me toxic. I don't think I really knew what that meant, except that it was the reason that I was so painfully lonely. Was that it? Was I swayed and drawn simply by the prospect of being genuinely loved? Not loved as you would understand, a deeper, more primal love, a need as much as a feeling, love that consumes you in all ways.
You can't help me, I'm sure of that now. I've tried to write it down, to put it into terms and words you could understand, and now I stare at it and not a word of it is even enough to fully describe the fact that I itch, because itch is not the right word. There is no right word, because for all your institute and ignorance may lord the power of the word it cannot even stretch to fully capture what I feel in my bones. What possible recourse could there be for me in your books, and files, and libraries, except more useless ink and dying letters. I see now why the hive hates you. You can see it, and log it, and note its every detail, but you can never understand it. You rob it of its fear, even though your weak words have no right to do so.
I do not know why the hive chose me but it did, and I think that it always had. The song is loud and beautiful and I am so very afraid. There is a wasps nest in my attic. Perhaps it can sooth my itching soul.
