Can You See Me Now?

Content Warning: Suicide

I wanted to be everything to you. To leave an imprint that would last for years and years so that, even in your quietest moments, you would think of me. I wanted to ignite every single one of your senses; I wanted your mouth to memorize the taste of mine, your eyes to widen with desire when you caught a glimpse of me in the hall. I wanted my scent to linger on your pillow, for your fingers to flex with wanting when you saw me, and for my voice to be the one you heard whispering in the dark. I wanted our names to be etched in the stars for everyone to see. 

I knew you. I knew your favorite color was green and your comfort movie was Wayne’s World. I knew you listened to death metal in your driveway when you were sad. I knew you preferred Twizzlers to Red Vines and you liked the roar of the ocean over the thousand small noises of a forest. I knew you loved your mom more than your dad. I knew you would wait until your parents went to bed before sneaking down to the basement to play video games, your eyes glued to the eerie blue of the screen without noticing how my eyes were always glued to you. I knew your tics and your vices and I knew your hopes and your dreams. Your biggest fears. I knew everything that made you you. 

Did you know anything about me? Anything at all? 

I didn’t just know you, I saw you. I saw the slight crook of your nose and knew it was broken during a game of Little League baseball. You had a mole in the curve of your right hip, you never skipped leg day, and you were vain about your hair. I saw how your eyes darted to the left right before you lied, the tension in your jaw when you had to pretend you liked Brock Heinz’s stupid jokes, the way your shoulders slumped when you didn’t get As on your tests. I saw the way you stared at girls who wore skirts, how you stood closer to the cheerleaders who wore floral perfumes. And I saw exactly what your face looked like when you used a sock to fulfill your fantasies. 

I saw you, but you never saw me. Not when I sat in the tree outside your window every night, not when I left my house an hour early to walk past your house the moment you left for school. Not when I wore the short skirts and the floral perfumes. And not the face I made when I touched myself and thought of you. 

I knew you. 

I saw you. 

I loved you. 

And I was always right there if you would have just looked at me. You would have noticed how long I had spent looking at you. Things could have been so different if you weren’t so selfish, if you weren’t so caught up by Sophia and Emily and Madison and the perfect girls with their perfect smiles and their perfect skin and their perfect hair. 

I wasn’t perfect. So I was invisible. 

Even when I tried to like what you liked, buying the band t-shirts your mom donated to Goodwill because you had outgrown them, learning about basketball despite the horrid squeaking sounds the shoes made, watching Star Trek even though it was your secret shame that you only watched when you were home, alone, on weekends. I tried to look like who you liked, even though the box dye left my hair feeling like straw, and the blonde coloring washed me out, and I had to put on even more makeup than normal to look like the Sophias and the Emilys and the Madisons of the world. I scoured the racks, looking for their knockoffs, trying to find the thing that would make you notice me, that would make me fit in. But I was no one, even though I tried and I tried and I tried to be someone to you, to be everything to you. 

“Ugh, the freak is staring at you again,” Madison huffed and rolled her eyes. You turned, your eyes scanning the library. I tried to stay calm, to look cute, and I put on a coy smile and sat a little straighter because it was coming, the moment, and everything was going to change. My cheeks burned, at first with embarrassment, but then with excitement and anticipation because finally, finally, you were going to notice me. 

Instead, your eyes passed over me. You looked through me, as if I were a ghost. 

“Who?” you asked her. 

Who? Who? Me! The girl who has memorized your face, the one who knows you would taste like spearmint if you ever kissed me because it’s your favorite kind of gum. The one who sent you an anonymous cookie on Valentine’s Day from ‘Your Secret Admirer’ because it’s romantic and cute and because it was supposed to make you wonder who sent it to you. You were supposed to care enough to find me and say “Hey, it’s you” while you thought to yourself It’s always been her and then we were supposed to get a happily ever after, goddammit. 

“You know who,” Madison rolled her eyes, “that girl whose dad…” her voice trailed off, because no one ever wants to say it. “You know.” 

“No, I don’t,” you said, and you sounded so confused. 

Because you really had no clue who I was. Maybe it was because you moved here after the incident, after the FBI raided our property and tore up our concrete patio and confiscated all the computers in our home. After the search warrant uncovered the evidence that he used his semi-truck to do things people don’t ever want to think about, let alone speak about. It was after my mom said, “I can’t handle this shit anymore,” and left town without me. After my mom’s grandma finally let me move into the trailer with her on the edge of town, and after I lost all my friends because someone started a rumor that I was complicit.  

Nana’s stupid chihuahua had peed in my only pair of shoes, I hadn’t slept well the night before, and I had run out of deodorant the morning we ran into each other. Literally speaking, we collided and I dropped my books everywhere and wanted to cry. But you bent down to collect everything and I was struck by you as you ran your hand through your perfect hair. You stood up, my things in your hands, and I could have basked in the warmth of your smile. And then you apologized. I think it’s the first time anyone had ever told me they were sorry without that infuriating, pitying smirk which made me feel like trash. It was your kindness, when no one was interested in being kind to me, that made me fall in love with you. 

I would have done anything to have your smile directed at me again. 

“Not that it matters, because I only have eyes for you,” you said to Madison, tearing me from the thoughts I tried not to think. 

I wanted to wail. I wanted to tear my hair out and scream at you because Madison was not the girl for you, could never be, because this was our story. You were ruining it. But I sat as cold and still as a corpse. Madison giggled, because of course she did, but she didn’t directly respond to what you thought was such a smooth line, because while I think you’re perfect at the end of the day, you’re just a teenage boy. Teenage boys are fucking stupid. That’s why you didn’t realize you never had a chance because everyone knew Madison was in love with Dylan Olson except for you. And I wanted to hate Madison, I wanted someone to direct all my rage towards, but it’s not her fault you’re an idiot. It’s not even her fault she looks the way she does, it’s just good genes and money. 

You followed her past me, out of the library and, as you walked by, you smiled at her and my heart was further twisted inside my rib cage. I was certain I could dip my fingertip into that dimpled grin of yours and that you could love me if you just noticed me. For once. But even when I was pointed out to you, you didn’t see me. I was no one, and it choked the air from my lungs and hurt me in a way that consumed me with rage. And pining. And love. I burned for you. 

And that’s how I knew I had to do it – something drastic. Because you are a dumb teenage boy and teenage girls who hang their hopes on dumb teenage boys are the worst kind of stupid. And I’m not stupid. I was just desperate to be loved by you. Don’t you see how much better my life could have been if you hadn’t been so self-centered? How much better our lives could have been? I could have been the girl from the movies who gets the makeover and is transformed by the love of the popular jock. You could have found a bit of depth, some meaning, to your golden, shiny existence. Don’t you see I could have made you so much more interesting than the girls you lusted over? 

But no. I was just the weird girl from the bad home with a past people gossiped about with horror and fascination. And you were the pretty boy with a secret sensitive side who was too stupid to save her. I could have transformed you with my love. And you could have changed my life, if you deigned to care. Even a little bit. 

But you didn’t care. And you didn’t see me. 

Until one day when you looked out your window, the window I spent so much time looking into, and then you saw me. You saw me and you will never be able to unsee me again. I’m seared into your brain, my mottled purple face and acute neck angle. The first time you made eye contact with me was the first time I could no longer see you. But you could have sworn I did, because my eyes were open and they seemed to bore right into yours. You screamed for your mommy and your dog started barking and then your mom started screaming, too. Yet, somehow, you could hear the creak of the tree as I swung gently in the breeze. You’ll never get that symphony of horror out of your head. 

You close your eyes and I’m there, you think you see me turning the corner at school, the hairs on your body stand at attention when people speak my name. You’re afraid to open your closet, to look out your window, to be in your house alone. Most of all, you’re afraid to tell people about all the ways you can’t stop seeing me now. Because maybe that would make you as crazy as me. 

Your parents cut down the tree, as if it was the tree’s fault, as if it would help you to sleep at night. You lost weight. Your grades slipped. Your friends started keeping their distance and now you know what it’s like to be the weird one. To be the freak. You are the boy who had the perfect life but who refused to shed his light on others. Now you are the boy who had that obsessive girl who did that terrible, horrible thing that has scarred you forever. I made you fall from your golden chariot and be trampled by it. 

“What did he do to her?” people ask in hushed voices. 

“Nothing!” your defenders cry. “He barely knew her, he never even talked to her.” 

“How did she get in then? They have the privacy fence.”

“They leave the back gate unlocked, everyone knows that.”

“Everyone who knows them does. But would a stranger?”

Your supporters never know what to say in response, so they just shrug their shoulders. 

The most vehement ones insist though, “No, there’s just no way. He’s such a good kid, I can’t imagine him doing anything that would cause someone to…”

They always trail off, or whisper it, as if saying it aloud would invite the darkness to shroud them, too. This is how tiny slivers of doubt creep into their minds; did they really know you? Your detractors know nothing, but they think they know everything, the way people who throw rocks at glass houses always do. 

“He must have known her. He must have done something,” they mutter under their breaths. 

It was nothing you did, and therein lies the problem, because sometimes that hurts more than doing something. You know what this is like now, because your friends’ silence hurts so much more than the fervent spread of gossip.  

Nothing. You did nothing. Do you wish you had seen me now? 

“We should move,” your mom argues. 

“He needs a fresh start,” your dad agrees. 

But you know, as I know, there is no escaping me. Because I left an imprint that will last forever, and in your darkest moments you can’t stop thinking of me. 

Sometimes you think you can sense me; is that my perfume you smell? The nice, floral scent that turns a little sweet, then a little too sweet, before it’s coppery and flooding your mouth and turning rancid and making you gag and gag and gag. You gasp for air to escape the scent, and you can’t help but wonder if this is what I felt like as I gasped my last breaths before – poof – it’s gone. There is no smell, you can breathe normally, you’re in the safety of your own home. What was that? Was it me? Or is it your guilt, eating away at the edges of your sanity until you think you can smell the dead girl who swung from your tree? 

They get you counseling, though you don’t want to sit in a confined space and talk to anyone, not even the warm, maternal woman they chose for you. 

“Are you sleeping?” 

“No.” 

Don’t lie to your shrink; you sleep. Everyone sleeps. You just don’t sleep well because I worm my way into your dreams. One minute you’re floating through your subconscious, looking tanned and healthy, and once again all the girls want to be with you and the guys want to be you. You’re with Madison at a dance, and she presses her body up against yours and everything feels good and right so you kiss her and your heart explodes into a thousand butterflies. Literally, because this is a dream, but it feels so good to have her mouth pressed against your mouth, your hands running over her smooth skin, the taste of her bubblegum tongue coloring your world pink. But then you pull away and it’s not her, it’s me, with a gaping, demented grin and my splotchy, discolored face and blank eyes that stare so deeply into your soul that you think you’ve gone to hell. You wake up screaming and so that’s why you tell your shrink you don’t sleep. Because even in the good dreams, even in the happy dreams where we’re together living our perfect lives, there’s a feeling of dread that pulses through your veins. It lights fire in the layer between your skin and your muscles and you know, somehow, that something is terribly, terribly wrong. Will I be the girl of your dreams tonight or the girl of your nightmares?

You’re stuck with me forever. 

“Are you having hallucinations?” Wendy, the warm counselor, asks and your head snaps up so quickly it almost reminds me of how quickly my neck snapped when I jumped from your tree. “Sometimes, when people go through a traumatic event and they’re not sleeping or eating right, they can see things or hear things that aren’t really there.” 

Oh, Wendy, but I am there. Not that you could tell her, because that’ll get you slapped with a label and shipped off to who knows where. How could you tell her about smelling my perfume? Or the shadow you see through the steamy bathroom fog every time you take a shower? How the tiny little hairs around your ear stand at high alert every time I whisper your name, whether it’s when you’re drifting off to sleep or playing your stupid video games or in a crowded gym with the squeak, squeak, squeaking of basketball shoes? How can you explain that you’ve memorized my face because it appears to you so frequently, even though you cannot recall seeing me when I was alive?  

“I’m not crazy,” you say aloud. 

“No one thinks you’re crazy,” Wendy reassures you. She’s a liar though. Lots of people think you’re crazy. Maybe our love wasn’t written in the stars, but we’ve been written in countless blog posts, and reddit threads, and think pieces. There are so many theories floating around the internet, especially as you continue to visibly decline and your parents adamantly defend you and the media attention just won’t go away. You talk to Wendy about it, how hard it’s been living up to the constant scrutiny, the theories, the whispers in the hall. And you lie to her, again, and tell her that it scares you, that you’re afraid you’ll never get your life back. 

That’s not what scares you, silly boy, and we both know it. You’re just too afraid to tell her what really has you upset, so you go for a version of the truth, one that sounds “normal.” It’s not the gossips dissecting your every move, it’s you dissecting your every move, wondering what you had done wrong, how you could have fixed this, if you could have saved me, why did I choose you? The thoughts race through your head until you can almost hear them, and then I whisper your name and you jump a foot because this can’t be happening, this can’t be real, and Jesus, maybe you are crazy. You just want your life back, to have it be like it was before. 

But don’t you get it? We can’t go back to the way it was before. I am the whispering, persistent, anxious narrator of all your nightmares and daydreams. No one else will ever have your attention the way I do now, and one day you’ll realize I did this for you. For us. I am the girl who loved you so much that I had to have you in the only way I could. In death. You’re not crazy, you just haven’t fallen in love with me yet, but now we have all the time in the world because wherever you go, I go. 

I got everything I ever wanted. But you, my love, will always be haunted. 

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