Written by Rebecca Egan
Content Warning: Child Sexual Abuse, Eating Disorders, Self-Harm.
There is a ghost in my bedroom. I wait for him. I scratch the cat with my foot. She rolls over,
exposing her belly. I run my toes through her fur. It tickles, just lightly. I am ignoring the
ghost in my bedroom. He comes at nights, ever since he died. As if he’s just gone back to
how it was when I was a small beast, come over by a wanting for tiny children. I had a
wildness to me then. At the thrill of a swing set, the gravel-grazed knees from flinging one’s
self off a bike by mistake. But not when he came to my bedroom.
I am twenty-nine now. But really, secretly down, I am still three. The first memory of
toddlerhood is mouthing “no, no, no” until my lips moved up against a palm that was not
mine, and eventually realised they were using energy I no longer had. As I grow, I am
strolled in and out of hospitals. I have become a problem. I am chopping up my arms and legs
as if they are a deer just hunted. Preparing myself for consumption. I am stripped by the
nurses to check for more wounds, each fold of my body inspected. A tsk, tsk at every
opening. They say skin regrows every seven years. This is too long of a time. I must make
my body regrow itself. I need to know I am a space he has never touched.
But then, he died. Of course, he finds his way back into my life. I first hear him as I am
walking to the supermarket. “Rebecca,” he shouts. “Rebecca.” I snap my twig of a neck
around, expecting to see a black-haired man on my street. But instead, nothing. Instead, a
pavement with no shoes or legs or arms or anything close to the jigsaw of a body. It happens
every time I leave the house, so I make the executive decision to not leave the house. It’s
fine, just a little confinement. But then he comes to my bedroom. A shadow of a man. And
it all goes downhill from there.
His voice begins to follow me around the home. “Don’t eat,” it says, “or I will mirror your
childhood on someone else.” An outline of a little girl enters my mind. Fine then, I won’t eat. I
can’t be at fault for that. “Don’t drink,” it demands. And I don’t. I make myself sick, toothbrush
down the throat until blood mixes with bile. The potassium in my body becomes too low and
I sip on an antidote in the emergency department. Psychosis, they explain, and pass me over
the pills. I am unsure. He’s too real. He was alive and now he’s here.
My psychiatrist tells me to yell FUCK OFF every time he speaks to me. She tells me not to
engage. That I need to keep myself in reality, that I am in a civil war. That really, I am
fighting myself. I have too much dopamine, too much trauma, too much magical thinking. He
says: “Stop taking your medication.” So I do.
They take me to the locked ward. I am in active psychosis, I am told. The psychiatric unit has
recently been renovated, and I have my own room. I can’t stop smacking my forehead. He is
yelling and he won’t FUCK OFF despite my screaming. I am a puddle on the floor and the
nurses look on. I ask to go home, politely. They say no. My body is not mine to control.
I have a dream: in the dream I write the perfect poem. The one that exorcises him from my
corporal flesh. When I was a nascent thing all I could do is feel his breath, wipe up the blood.
But I am bigger now. An adult. With a fully formed chest. I imagine feeding my small self
soup—a thick potato and leek—making her eggs and soldiers in the morning. Show her how
to march the toast right into the yolk of day. The metaphor feels warm, so I follow it. What if
I handed her a pocketknife. No, too much blood. She asks for my muscle. A force to fight
back. I lean before her, hands unfurled. I pass her an adult’s strength.
I wake up and he is on top of me. This is what it is to be three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. My
friends grew up and I grew under the body of an old man pummelling me into a mattress. I
read the dream poem to his ghost. I imagine him buried in the ground. Secretly, I wish I had
gotten to shovel the dirt. I burn the letter. He comes that night, whispers in my ear: “You can’t
motherfucking get me.” But I can. I can.
When the ghost of him comes to my room I say FUCK OFF.
When the ghost of him comes to my room, this time, I fight back.
.
Rebecca Egan is a mad poet and researcher from Melbourne, Australia. Her work has previously been featured in Thimble Lit Magazine, 3Elements, Peeking Cat Poetry and Persephone’s Daughters. Her poetry explores the complexities of relational trauma and how to move through the world after it has become an unsafe place to inhabit. She is also an avid fan of a piping hot cup of tea.