This is going to be a long entry. But I’ve been thinking about writing it for a while, and it feels like it’s time.
I just finished watching The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and for the first time ever, I’m ashamed and a bit worried that I’m not baptized. I can’t explain it really well, but if you watch the movie, you’ll understand why. That movie brought back a lot of my own memories and feelings about the apartment from earlier this year. No, I wasn’t possessed, but yes, I believe it is possible. I was just haunted. I deliberately didn’t write a lot about it at the time, because I didn’t think it was a good idea to … encourage … whatever it was. I think… I think whatever or whoever was in my apartment sought attention, and I didn’t want to … it was almost like I was afraid that the written word would give credence to it. And I think that was a bad idea. Even now, sitting here at 5:30 on a Saturday afternoon, I’m not 100% sure this is a good idea, but at the same time, I feel I need to get my thoughts and experiences out.
On Good Friday (March 21 – ten days after I’d officially moved in, and coincidentally? a full moon), Curious1 came by my apartment. I think that was the first night we had sex. Now normally, he was very lazy after our encounters, but they’d been oral up until that point. He admitted that after having sex, he was usually a bundle of energy, and that’s true enough. I watched him bop around my bedroom like a pinball on steroids – here, there, everywhere. Most of his time was spent in the northeast corner of my room, where I had my series of Black Stallion books sitting. The books weren’t in order, and he spent a good fifteen minutes rearranging them (halfway through his organizational process, I let him in on the fact that the spines were numbered).
The week following (I don’t have exact dates), I started noticing strange, odd things in my apartment. Not that things were moving on their own, or anything like that, but that there was a bad, negative energy in the place, and that it was centred in my bedroom. Indigo was even acting strangely; flying away from me and into other rooms and screeching at the top of his little lungs for no reason. Taken by itself, I assumed he was simply getting used to new digs. Anyway, when I mentioned it to T., she took me seriously. She told me to put a white candle(s) in the place that I felt the most negativity, and add a bowl of water. Water attracted and held negative energy, thus cleansing the room around it. I did both of these things, and changed the water nightly.
T. also suggested patchouli oil, so I bought some of that, and spread it around the doors and windows, in an attempt to repel negative energy. While I spread the oil, I muttered a little incantation to myself about negative energy leaving my space; I repeated this every night when I changed the water, too. I also moved a mirror. It had been on my cupboard door, facing the window. I moved it to a wall where it doesn’t face a window or another mirror.
A few weeks later (April 7, the day after the new moon), Curious1 came back. We enjoyed ourselves, and when he left at two-thirty, I felt drunk. I felt dizzy, as I imagine someone who’s on some narcotic would feel. You know how, in movies, they show people are drunk or high by tilting the camera, slowing things down, and making the edges of things a bit blurry? That’s how I felt. I composed a text to send to T. after Curious1 left, but I didn’t send it.
The next night, I woke up at two-thirty. I should say, the next night and most nights thereafter. I even emailed my sister and my father to see if anyone was having bad dreams. According to the journal entry I wrote on April 9 (Wednesday), I was afraid to turn the light on in the bedroom for fear I wouldn’t turn it back off. For a week, though, if I was home, there was a light on in my bedroom at all times. It got to the point that I even slept with the overhead light on because I couldn’t sleep with it off. Whatever was in my room, it was in the northeast corner where Trevor had spent so much time on his first visit. I told T. that I felt it was malevolent… not dangerous in the sense that I feared for my life, but just mean-spirited and unkind. (for the record, this is all really hard to remember, not the details, I mean, but the act of writing this down. I’m quite anxious and worried, but there’s something in me prompting me to write this out, too. I’m almost lightheaded, like you are when you know you’re doing something that someone wouldn’t like…)
At some point in these proceedings, T. called me to tell me she felt it was a woman. That she wondered exactly where my apartment was in relation to Battlefield Park, because she questioned if it was someone who involved in the war.
Okay, I can’t write any more of this right now. I’ll have to pick it up later. I feel very alone right now, and I don’t want to be.
