The Grip of It

by Jac Jemc

He said gamblers play until they lose because they want to feel something, not necessarily a win.

Julie, at heart, is a people pleaser, a straight-A student. She’s had a series of jobs she hates but can’t help being the best at. If someone gives her advice she deems sound, she’ll act on it immediately.

I think about how smoking is a way of trying to satisfy each moment. It disregards the future.

It feels more like something in the space between James and me, though, like an electricity that’s been turned on since we’ve taken up this new life, something that buzzes at its highest frequency when we’re both home, together.

What role were we playing? The ghosts or the haunted?

Every time a door in the house creaks, it says something a little different, and like those picture puzzles where you have to find the errors, we can’t pinpoint it, but we hear the something that is off.

Julie, the dedicated perfectionist, was known for following through. But now, all of her patterns have splayed into chaos. The balance of our collective reliability has been thrown off. If she’s not in charge, no one is.

I’d worried about since I was a teenager, the serenity of a bath marred by my anxiety about my own volume.

When I was a child, I feared the day I would identify what I wanted to do. What I wanted was to stay free. The worst nightmare appeared to be recognizing how you wanted the world to change.

“What the…,” he whispers, afraid, as I am, of something, unsure if we fear scaring the dark spot away or inviting it to stay.

We are silent together for a long while, but I know what it is to wait when something is coming toward you slowly.

“This all sounds right, but now I’m questioning myself. I heard that if you remember a thing, you corrupt it. If you want to remember something closest to its truth, the trick is to remember it rarely. But, of course, if you don’t remember a thing often enough, you’re bound to forget it. There is no way for memory to be pure.”

What is worse? To be confronted with an obvious horror, or to be haunted by a never-ending premonition of what’s ahead?

My analytical mind ties itself in knots trying to reason through our situation, almost as if trying to understand what’s happening is making it worse.

There are times when saying nothing means nothing, and then there are times when nothing holds an answer. Pathetic distractions pull James away from me, and he thinks my silence is without substance, but I think it means the world.

the defeat of it feels larger than the threats we face if we stay.

where this internal bruise has come from, like all the others: it’s that house that’s been sinking into me, farther and farther.

and I should be afraid, but I am so happy at the prospect of being washed away.

That’s really the most I could ask from anyone: to hear someone say that I count more in her mind than logic.

“Bad behavior heralds ruin. I’ve been reading up on hauntings. If a spirit knows you’ve been doing bad things, they’ll have a harder time leaving you alone. They want your bad energy out of their space.”

“I think it is, Jules. I think we’re haunting ourselves. We’re pulling ourselves apart. We’re noticing gaps and stepping into them instead of avoiding them.”

The bed is hotter when he’s in it, and I hate that, but it’s a hate I’d rather not do without. In other words, I love hating his presence when it means a few degrees under a blanket. Even if I don’t recognize him right now, I can recognize the heat coming off his body. Even though I don’t recognize him, I am growing to recognize myself.

What is better? To accept the horror presented before you or search for a way out? To hunt in yourself for a comparable defect or to pull yourself tall and strong to support the correction of someone else’s faults?

There is no acceptable, untainted name for a wilderness of the mind. People will always wonder what to believe. They expect the stray inaccuracies to be looted out and abandoned. They expect the mind’s voice to unstitch only when alone. When the seams rip, they look away.

Hospitals, I realize, fill themselves full of accusations, of people believing certain truths about their blood and their hunger and their minds, and when another tries to force guidance on any of these topics, the impulse can be to travel as far away from these assumptions as possible.

This home comprises a collection of openings. Each provides access to our lives. Terrifying clues propose who we are and what consumes us.

Normal feels like a performance today, but we fake our way through, hopeful we’ll grow into our actions.

I search for proof that the world is one way rather than another, but it doesn’t matter what is coming from inside us or around us. Our brains allow it either way. We can lose ourselves behind a trapdoor, whether in our mind or in the house.

That is just to say there is no sense in knowing where the line is drawn. We can mark the place that indicates This is how much we can take; we can monitor it, but that line, nevertheless, constantly moves.