Play Nice

by Rachel Harrison

There’s still glitter on my hands. There will always be glitter on my hands. Glitter is permanent.

I keep walking, and as I march up the slight hill toward the house, I wonder what right Daphne has, what right anyone has, to say what is and isn’t love. I wonder if love can be ugly. If it can do the wrong thing. Bad things. I wonder if it can ever really die.

I brush my teeth, rinse with Listerine. I can still taste the fear in my mouth, even after my valiant attempts to wash it out.

So this is what the paranormal does to a person. It separates your mind from your body, severs your logic like a gangrenous limb. It’s a unique suffering. One that inspires more ridicule than empathy.

“Here’s the thing,” I say, slipping my legs out from under me and planting both feet firmly on the carpet. “I can leave anytime I want. I don’t live here. If you want to play with me, you have to play nice.”

There’s something terrible about that time between lightning and thunder. That cruel purgatory of anticipation, waiting for the universe to scream.

It doesn’t need to play nice. I have nowhere else to go. Nowhere I want to be, at least.

I understand why some ears bleed at the sound of this laughter. It’s not evil. It’s not joyous. It’s a lonely sound. This being in front of me is what it is, and it cannot change. It lives in this place amid the damage and the chaos it reaps just by existing, and it breaks my heart because it’s so familiar to me. I love it and I hate it, and I admire it, aspire to be it, and I resent everything about it that I recognize within myself.

Mom couldn’t figure out how to beat it, how to exorcise it, so she tried to live with it. Give it everything it wanted. Everything it could possibly want. She played along. Played nice.

Remembering is not always a light shone into darkness. Sometimes it’s a claw reaching out and dragging you back.

There’s the promise of a pretty morning, the sun teasing its grand entrance with pink phosphorescence.

I accept that it exists. That there’s a being out there that wants my attention, my energy, my best, my worst. My joy. My pain. That’s taken from me and would continue to take should I allow it, should I continue to dance with it, and if I were to say anything about it, no one would listen. No one would believe me. Not really. Not without their doubts. Without questioning my honesty, my integrity, my sanity. Whether I deserved it.

But I have no regrets, because I know now that she wasn’t crazy. I’m not sure anyone is. I think it’s just easier to call someone crazy than it is to admit that they could be right. Easier to call someone crazy than to confront the nuance of their circumstance, than to accept the callous cruelty that exists in the world we live in, the evil out there that revels in our suffering.