When you grow up, you’re supposed to stop believing in monsters, but there is one inside my desk drawer, buried under a stack of police reports. She is folded at the limbs and flattened onto a torn-out magazine page. Yellow face, lips parted in mock surprise, one eyelid drearily half open.
She is a child’s doll whose eyes close when she’s tilted, crossbred with a man’s violent, red-lipped fantasy. A love object, a receptacle for loneliness, anything you want her to be and nothing at all. A sex doll found in the cabin.
When I first saw her in the magazine, beside old photos of Gary Wilensky, she seemed like another version of him. What he looked like from the inside out.
Stalker, hebephile, erotomaniac, psychotic.
Of all the diagnoses used to explain Gary’s mind-set, she might provide the most visceral indication of what gripped him in his final days: his disconnect from real relationships, the conflicts of his desire, and his delusional belief that a young woman was an object he could fold up and store away.
The problem with diagnoses is that they’re mistaken for answers. We are either our diseases or the diseases we’ve overcome.
Separation anxiety, panic attacks, self-harming behavior, borderline, depression and anxiety, suicidal ideation, mixed bipolar.
I take an assortment of prescriptions to sleep, to stay awake, to stay medium. What I had then is what I have now, only there is a different language surrounding it and there are somewhat unreliable tools to blunt it. Sometimes, what you believed you’d grow out of, you end up growing into.
At thirty-eight, I am single and childless, not by choice, but by instinct. The fourteen-year-old in me would consider this condition a point of shame and frantically try to root it out. I am not who I thought I would be, but that is what happens when you look ahead. All you see are the possibilities for change.
When you look back, you see what you’ve held on to, what was stronger than outside influence, what you carried with you all these years.
Maybe it’s something you need.
I have always been drawn to the company of my own obsessions—dissecting the reasons behind them, following the trails they leave behind. Not all obsessions are destructive. Some force you to confront your privilege. They project your fears through a clearer lens and reveal patterns you hadn’t noticed before. Some even come alive in your mind, so that neither of you are ever really alone.
Remember the night in the car when the bargain was made. The blinkers flashing gasps of light down Park Avenue. The candy-coated smell of the upholstery. The windows coated in something, too. Sometimes it’s light snow; other times it’s rain. Always it’s night—black with headlight circles. The door locks are sunken, the heater breathes. I am looking at Gary and he is looking at the street. The traffic light cycles back to yellow. Always he says: You all grow up and leave me. Always I promise I won’t.