It is the shapeless demon found in one of Stephen King’s most famous works, attacking children and feasting on the fears of young, innocent children.
It attacks every twenty-seven years, ripping children from what is supposed to to be the time of their lives and leaving their blood smeared across its’ teeth like a badge of honour.
It is also what I call my old best friend.
They slipped into my life near the end of seventh grade, lips curled into a soft smile and slim fingers outstretched as a sign of friendship. Their hair was longer than I thought hair could grow, frayed at the edges with a hint of red.
I blindly grabbed their hand.
Now we sit here, nearing six years later, with me sleep-deprived and aching with the distraught emotions of being alive. And them, happier than I could ever imagine myself to be. Remembering that they’re happy burns the ends of my nerves with anger and sadness because I wish it was me.
During those six years, I felt more pain that I felt when my father curled his hands around my throat and shoved me into a wall, mocking me as blood dripped from my nose and split lip. I felt more pain than my mother uttered for the five hundred and fiftieth time that I was nothing more than an unwanted mistake. I felt more pain than the time I collapsed unwillingly as my body begun to eat myself inside out. I felt more pain than the time I tried to kill myself, unnamed pills burning the pit of my stomach and blood dripping from every spot I could reach.
I felt more pain because it was the first time I blindly reached for another person.
I learned what it meant to shut down on yourself for years at a time, unwilling to let yourself feel because feeling meant opening an unwanted closet filled with skeletons. My skeletons were not in fact mine but ones I dragged from their very hands and shoved into mine, believing that if I took on their ghosts and their demons, it was being a friend. I learned what it meant to detach yourself from reality, hands dripping with their blood and words of confusion dying on the tip of your tongue. I learned what it meant to be a messenger, caught between a compulsive liar and my naive heart.
I can’t sleep at nights anymore, my body too used to a routine of talking them out of suicide. The night my brother was rushed to the hospital for his oxygen levels dropping too low, his frail chest rising and falling rapidly as he wheezed was the same night It told me that they could get me to kill myself if they wanted to; like I was nothing more than a pawn in a game of chess they were determined to win. The same night I got shoved to the ground with the harsh spit of a slur, my body burning with the fear of seeing my father in the face of a seventeen year old, I talked them out of committing suicide for the five hundred and fifty-fifth time. The same day I got a gift I had desperately been waiting for, I dragged them off the floor of our school bathroom and wiped their blood off the tiles. Their blood seeped beneath my fingernails and burned against my knees as my fourteen year old self shut down, wrapping a bloody arm with my favourite hoodie and feeling their dull blade slice into my finger as I dropped it into the can just a mere few feet away from me.
Attention, they later told me. It felt like you weren’t paying enough attention to me. I wanted to see if you cared.
I call them It because maybe comparing them to a demon can make them love them less.
As if the act of turning a human into a demon can turn my love into anger. But it doesn’t work like that. Hatred is purely the absence of love and when I stare into the mirror at four in the morning, another all-nighter carrying me to the time I should be awake for work, I know there’s no absence of love.
It once told me that I loved too easily; I chased things that my parents never gave me.
As I see It around places I can no longer call safe, I wish I could go back to the very few seconds between bloody hands and empty threats where I felt loved for once.
Maybe I do love too easily, pieces of my heart swelling at the sight of a person who looks for a second too long or hearing the laughter of a person who actually finds my jokes funny.
But that isn’t a fault of mine.
But was a fault of mine was loving It. A demon who feasts on the fears of young naive children and tears them apart at their weakest moments.
