Way the white door6/29/2023 I’d first discovered them in my peripheral vision outside my bedroom on the stairs late at night when I couldn’t sleep. ![]() Slowly getting closer to me every time I looked away. They were motionless beings, staring blankly at me, only moving when I wasn’t looking. Something in the pit of my stomach would turn and I would feel sick around them. She told me that maybe they were angels sent by God to watch and protect me. My mother looked over at what to her was an empty corner in her bedroom. I told her that there is one with us now in the corner of the room. She asked me when the last time was that I had seen one. But I couldn’t get a good look at them, as soon as I turned my head they were gone. I told her that I see things out of the corners of my eyes. My mother gave me a hug and asked me what was wrong. I needed to be reassured and comforted because I had scared myself badly. One night when I was six years old I went into my parents bedroom feeling guilty that I wasn’t yet asleep. ![]() Was someone there or was my imagination getting the best of me? Overtime I got better at being watchful, and looking without shifting my gaze. The kinds of things that always begged to be questioned. Not things I could look at directly but rather things that appeared in my peripheral vision. Things that found a way out of the trappings of wooden frames. They were a constant presence, staring out at me from the wooden veneers. There was a door for every room in the house. The strange images in the door weighed on me. The nightmares and the lack of sleep only made my already active imagination worse. It wasn’t until I went away for college that I was able to rest peacefully. Later in high school I dealt with my insomnia by not sleeping for days until I could fall asleep quickly. It wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up hours after going to bed only to be too afraid to fall back asleep. They didn’t want to dabble in curses and superstition.Īs I got older the sleep terrors continued as nightmares. But my parents who were religious, believed in angels and demons, not folklore. My grandmother who came to America from Italy as a child told my parents that she had felt a strange presence that night and begged them to allow her to do a prayer to remove the maloik, an old world superstition. When my grandmother picked me up from my crib she said she felt something in the room, something new, different and dark. There was something else she was afraid of as well. My grandmother raced to my bedroom worried the window facing my crib would break under the violent wind. However the lightning did claim the house’s electricity. A tornado had been spotted that night but never touched down. She told me that she was watching me the night a bad storm hit our neighborhood. She would watch me during the day while my parents were at work, and in the evenings, when they went out to dinner. My grandmother told me that as a small child I was prone to sleep terrors. For as long as I can remember I always had trouble falling asleep in my parents house. I was told that my brother found her late one night in October, locked in the downstairs bathroom naked lying in her own blood with her wrists sliced open. Instead she would just smile sadly and change the subject. It seemed as if she wanted to tell me something but couldn’t. There was also a look in her eyes that bothered me they were sleepless, panicked and broken. She had lost weight and seemed starved for visitors. ![]() My last couple visits home I had noticed she seemed more fragile than she should for a woman her age. She kept herself busy by working for the church and caring for her parents. My mother who after divorce, and my brothers moving away, had been living alone. Her death came for her quickly and unexpectedly. She wasn’t old and nearing the end of her life. She hadn’t been fighting a disease or infection for years. It wasn’t a slow death with time to make amends, adjust or say goodbye. ![]() The circumstances of her death did not make things any easier. It is this kind of horror that I have felt ever since I learned of my mothers passing. It’s a slow deterioration, separating you from all forms of comfort and happiness. True horror is painful, often sad, and tragic. It needs time to mold, decay, and spread. Horror in real life is a slow realization that occurs over the course of years. Horror in real life doesn’t come suddenly, it’s not a shock, or a reactionary scream.
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