This is How Obsession Feels

It is a lonely place

There is a part of me that is locked inside four padded white walls inside my head. I suppose that is the part of myself that I would call Misty. The only person who has ever been able to reach her there is Snake — in his absence, Misty is completely alone.

The part of me that socializes, that gets along with other people, that does the menial tasks of cleaning, and doesn’t mind the constant bickering of the children — the part that my ex-husband, Atlas, loved — that person is hard for me to keep up. There are times when Misty’s energy is all I can access.

But nobody seems to like Misty, nobody in my small world, at least. Who but Snake would take it as a legitimate conversation starter when I say that serial killers are psychologically more interesting than mass shooters, instead of as a sign that I might need medication? Who but Snake would think that my mild intrigue with David Koresh is anything but perfectly natural? Who but Snake would be completely comfortable with the idea that, at the end of my life, I want to drink a strong herbal poison, curl up in bed, and never wake up again? (When I’m old, that is, when my children’s children are grown and Snake is long gone.)

I don’t say these things out loud. I’ve seen the look, gotten it for much lesser things that I’ve said — that mixture of wariness and shadowed fear, like I just might crack at any moment and start ripping the house to pieces. Like I just might be dangerous. I’m not — the most harm I’ve ever caused anyone is the normal psychological damage that we all inflict on our children from time to time without even realizing it — but only Snake doesn’t seem to feel in some way threatened by Misty.

Instead, I just agree once again as I am told how shitty the president is.

Snake is not afraid. He is not afraid of himself, he is not afraid to be himself. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t have a room in his head where that shit has to reside. He is just himself, and fuck anybody who doesn’t like it. That’s not to say that he isn’t afraid of anything, because everybody is afraid of something, but he is not afraid of death, and he is not afraid of who he is. There are so few people like that in the world.

The day I realize that I am looking for someone who can do what Snake did, someone who can break through those stifling walls and reach Misty where nobody else can, is the day I stop doing it.

I am driving home from yet another pointlessly pleasant homeschool co-op meeting, where I had sat darkly to the side while all the cute little moms and their cute little kids chatted about nature and curricula and their various church socials. It had happened over and over — I met a mother somewhere, or found a homeschool group online, and thought, this will be different. Then I would get to their house, and lo and behold! there are Bible verses plastered on the walls. The furniture is impossibly impeccable, like something out of a Magnolia magazine. And the conversations are all exactly the same, and I realize, yet again, that there is nobody here that I remotely relate to.

The only thing I have in common with these people is that I managed to procreate.

So I drive home, listening to Starset’s “Dark on Me,” and suddenly I just start crying. Because I feel lonely and misunderstood? No. Because I feel like a failure? Not at all. Because couched within the words of that dreadfully sad song, all I can see is the eventuality that one day I will be standing over Snake’s coffin and then I will truly be alone.

Snake started visiting me in my dreams, you see. I actually hadn’t thought of him in a couple of years, and then I had a dream.

He was looking for me.

And then I had another dream, in a different setting, different plotline, but still, he was looking for me. And then another, and another, until I felt like I was going crazy. He wouldn’t leave me alone. There would be brief breaks, a week or two without a dream, but then it would start back up again, sometimes four or five nights in a row I would dream of him looking for me.

Finally, I took a notebook and I tried to write him out. Until that point, I had always been able to write things out of myself. It had worked with my sperm donor, it had worked with the Cowboy — why not with Snake? But for the first time in my life, it didn’t work. I wrote and wrote, I filled up notebooks, and I couldn’t get him out. And still, I kept dreaming.

Although the dreams changed, once I started writing. Now it was me looking for Snake. Sometimes we found each other, but only briefly. There was one dream where we kissed, but only the one.

And then a strange thing happened. The dreams lessened after a few years after I got up the courage to tell Atlas how I missed Snake. I still had them, of course, but they were fewer and farther between. And now, we were no longer seeking. I had found him, so it seemed, but now he was ignoring me. I had a rash of dreams where he would barely look at me, or pat me on the head like a child, or show up and then disappear again. I was afraid, I realized — afraid that he didn’t care about me anymore.

“Can I tell you something kind of awkward?”

My old friend, W, nods. I look down at the lake, embarrassed but knowing I have to say it. “I think about Snake every day,” I tell him. “I don’t mean to. I’m just doing dishes or something, and he’s there. Every single day. Constantly. There is never a time when I’m not thinking about him, he’s like background noise in my head that never goes away.”

W is quiet for a while because it’s a weird thing to tell somebody.

“Do you need closure?” he asks finally.

“Yeah, maybe so,” I answer in a mumble. “Something like that.”

I don’t want to use the word ‘closure’.

Some people dread their own death. I don’t. Barring some horrific accident, I am likely to outlive most of the people of my generation that I have loved. The day that Snake dies, that is the day that I dread, and the decade or two or three or four that I will have to carry on after that. I will carry on, I’m sure, but the part of myself that only he can reach — well, that part will probably die with him. I will never again hear his voice, which I have always loved, or feel the energy that runs through his hands that nobody else seems to have.

After he dies, I will never again have the chance to find out what it was that made him who he is — his very existence is an anomaly to me. When we were kids, did he touch something in me that was already there, or did he create it? I may never know.

I don’t blame him in the slightest for refusing to give me closure. I didn’t give him closure. Closure isn’t really what I wanted, anyway, and I like to imagine it’s not what he wanted.

Am I obsessed? Well, Misty is, that part of me that’s locked up inside my head, it’s pointless to deny that. But I can’t contact him now, and if I am never able to again before he dies — well, then I’ll never know.