Migration

They've set somewhere up for us. Deep into the Shire counties. Not going to say which one, but yeah; away from cities, in the country areas. Changing cars regularly, unmarked license plates. We'll be taken to a house in the middle of the woods, full of police, armed and equipped. Camera perimeter, motion detectors. The police have attained special permission  to be armed with submachine guns, body armour, night vision goggles. They let me hold one. The Heckler and Koch MP7, they called it. It was heavy. Looked like it should be attached to a lightgun game in an arcade. Several trained police guards, each with one of these, is being put up against a tall bald man. Why am I not more confident?

I haven't shared my suspicions about him being something...not entirely human. My sister, Nadine, won't stop crying. She's eleven, but even now fear is overcoming her. We haven't told her about exactly what's going on, but she knows that whatever did that to Ms. Fisher, and her boyfriend, and Joey, well he's coming after us, and our attempts to run are failing. We're still in the waiting room of the local police station, like we have been for days now. She's lying across hard plastic chairs, her head on my mother's lap. My mother's stroking her head, desperately trying to reassure her that it's all going to be okay. My dad's been staring at the vending machine for twenty minutes. He can't even look at us anymore. Stir craziness set in a long time ago. The police went to get our stuff; we didn't even have a chance to unpack most of it. But I don't feel like doing anything, like I have no agency. In my lap I have Simon's copy of House of Leaves, open to some random page. The colour version, the one you can't get in Europe. A book about being stalked by a nameless horror as paranoia slowly envelops you? You see why I'm not in storytime mood.

I don't even know why I'm keeping this blog anymore. I guess I need somewhere to vent, and the knowledge that there are people out there who care about me. I looked back over the old entries. Interning at Motcombe seems like a lifetime past. I find myself feeling nostalgic for three months ago. I'm at a loss to explain why all this is happening. Did I deserve this? Did I bring this upon myself? Why did everything have to get so fucking fucked up? There doesn't seem to be a reason. It's just arbitrary, and yet it's derailed my life and the life of my family. I have been made prey; something to be devoured. My mindset is shaky, my nerves brittle. I think of Daddy less and less as a person these days. He's a force, a presence, far more than a man. My would be killer has, in my mind, become a monster, his form black and swirling, writhing, chaotic, and at times I find my will to live draining like warm water in a basin, leaving only an exposed cold, when I think of him.

I've been trying to occupy myself with memories of before all this. Lying in bed with Simon. Hanging out with my friends, eating with my family round the table as we talk about all the nothings we did that day. They seem like things I saw in a photograph once. My life is fear and disgust and paranoia...and something else, lingering in the back of my skull like an ache itch, that I can't quite put my finger on.

"Then for an instant, feeling stripped and bare, I teeter on an invisible line suspended between something terrible and something terribly sad."

I've looked down at the book. I've been letting tears drip-drop down onto it for about five minutes now. Simon's going to be so pissed the next time I see him. He's going to remind me that he doesn't pop over to Canada and happen upon copies of this book every other day, then he'll complain for a while. I wonder, almost idly, if I'm going to see him again. Not when, if. Not "when I'm reunited with the person I love more than anyone, who I sometimes dream about being with for the rest of my life, he a journalist or writer or film critic, me a teacher, as we grow older and raise a family and watch it grow and - " but if. I don't think about "if not." I've never felt like this before. No belief - none at all - that things will get better. A faint hope, but no actual conviction that it will do so. No optimism left in me. I believed that the world was a beautiful, harmonious place, where good ultimately triumphs. I don't any more. And it hurts.

That's enough from me. I just need to get my thoughts out of my head. Anti-viral medication time. We're going soon. I now leave you with a quote from a classic book. Go educate yourselves.

"The truth of the matter, I sometimes thought, was not so much that I wanted to die, as that I no longer wanted to go on living in my present manner." - Alberto Monrovia, Boredom