SOMETIMES I FEEL like I grew up on another planet.

Not just because it was East Texas, home to a strange mix of football fans, cowboys and adult women who liked to decorate their kitchens with cutesy signs and Precious Moments figurines. It’s that technology has changed so much that my teenage years feel obsolete. It was a small town, so we were always about ten years behind anyway. I didn’t have a personal email address until I got to college, and my family shared a computer with dial-up so slow that I couldn’t have downloaded porn even if I wanted.

So, binging media was an impossibility for the most part. At least in the way we do now with Netflix and Instagram. I mean, I’m at the point where I have to set a timer on my social media accounts so I don’t scroll all day. But back then, we had our own way of binging media, and it all centered around music.

My attempts to grow beyond my small town were deeply set in discovering music that no one else listened to—punk, goth, hardcore. You name it, and as long as the jocks weren’t listening to it, I was into it. And surprisingly, I had a group of comrades interested in this music, too. A set of fellow outcasts. We wore dark lipstick, cut our hair short and talked about liking Green Day before they were popular. I’d take my measly allowance from my surprisingly good grades and, after poring over music catalogs full of records I had never heard of, I’d just choose the ones with girl singers. I can’t say this always produced great records arriving in the mail, but I felt cutting edge nonetheless. And mostly it was about the rebellion of it all and the acknowledgment that there was something outside my small town—a world to be discovered and explored that was interesting. Maybe even dangerous.

Well, definitely dangerous. I just didn’t know that yet.

Music was my life and I crafted my world around it. We all did. If you live in a town where identity is usually formed based on your place within the hierarchy of a cheerleader versus nerd crowd, to choose neither is a statement. One we embraced wholeheartedly.

My friends and I watched MTV obsessively. It was like a window into an outside world. Sure, it had boy bands with their bleached tips and the nineties music tropes we all laugh at now, but it also had 120 Minutes and bands like Nirvana and Weezer, who were mainstream but, in our opinion, very cool.

The most important part of this story, however, is understanding the friend group itself. Our friendship was based on our outsider status and our love of music. We’d trade CDs as quick as we’d trade tampons. We’d drive three hours to Dallas for shows, only to drive back that same night to get home in time for school in the morning. I mean, come on. If you wanted to see the Descendents live, what other choice did you have? (Apparently we could’ve waited twenty years for all their reunion shows, but how was I to know that then?) We talked about bands constantly, in addition to the normal things like boys and how much our town sucked. Graduation seemed like it was on the horizon but always a little too far away.

I loved those girls. We spent every moment together we could. Afternoons lying in each other’s beds plucking one another’s eyebrows. Hours and hours on the phone every night. I walked to and from school every day, and they’d often join me in the afternoons, as there is nothing quite as great as a teenage latchkey kid’s house and a big TV. On my way home, there was an abandoned shack we’d often stop inside to tell spooky stories while eating bags of chips on the dirty floor. It was the beauty of being a teenager.

Teen-girl friendships run deep, and there is a pecking order innate to all of them. Not to brag, but since that time in my life, I have been in many situations with powerful people—actors, some of the most famous directors in the world, even a few famous politicians—and I will say that not one of them can hold a candle to the power of a teenage girl who is the head of her clique. The head of the clique is the most powerful girl in the world.

Ours was Melody.

Dyed jet-black hair and the ability to wear stovepipe jeans that didn’t make her look sloppy and three feet tall. She could even skateboard, which was miraculous to my scrawny, indoor-kid body. She had that alternative style that was hard to achieve because it involved looking effortless while wearing the most demanding wing-tipped eyeliner. Melody had the ability to change your life by loving or hating you. And she often took the time to prove it to you.

She carried around a notebook. It was just like a normal one you’d buy at Walmart in a pack of three, but hers may as well have been plated in gold. She referred to it as her “secret dossier.” I’m sure she got this from an X-Files episode or something, but she said she used it to keep tabs on everything that happened in our small town. Most importantly, she kept tabs on us.

We could never see inside it, and even if she had left the secret dossier alone, it was too powerful for us to take a peek. I felt it would have blinded us with what I only imagined were the harshest truths that could ever be written. Once a week or so, she would notice something—a new way we wore our hair, a comment, anything. She would smile a strange smile, open the secret dossier and write a note. A personal note that none of us would be privy to. Something that could take us all down. It was the peak of teen-girl cruelty.

Combine the secret dossier, her aesthetic and her general confidence, and you had the coolest, most powerful girl in the world.

Unlike me, Melody was a rule breaker. She would cut class, and she smoked cigarettes. I had no idea how to do those things without feeling monumentally guilty. The one time we got caught going to Burger King during lunch, I cried to my parents for days. They didn’t even ground me because they knew I already felt bad enough. Looking back, I think my good-girl mentality got under Melody’s skin, but every leader needs a herd of sheep to follow them, so she kept me around.

It wasn’t her rebelliousness that led to her downfall, though. I think it was her obsession. She would become obsessed with one band or one boy or one T-shirt, and that would be the only thing she could talk about for days. I think he used that. The Eyeless Man. That’s what I call him, because that’s what she called him. He might have used her cruelty as well. That teen-girl meanness made her both a leader and an outsider, and that’s something he could use to his advantage.

I think about it a lot because something had to make her an easy target. Otherwise it could have easily been me. It could still be me.

The intensity of a teenage female friendship cannot be overstated. These girls are your best friends, your confidantes, the people you learn from and the only reason to get up in the morning. What they think about you matters.

And at the time this happened, they couldn’t stand me. Or at least Melody couldn’t, and the rest of them fell in line. Female infighting is about as easy to explain as the passive-aggressive shit that happens to a couple after ten years of marriage. Why is there tension about the dish towels? The answer cannot be found without exploring every intricacy of a long-term relationship. But teen female friendships don’t need ten years of marriage for them to become complicated.

In this situation, there had been a long buildup. It was hard to get cigarettes at that age, and Melody had secured a pack. After all her effort, which I’m sure involved hard-core flirting with the entirely too old convenience-store worker, I wasn’t interested in partaking, and that burned her. She picked up her secret dossier, glanced my way and made a note. The next day, the entire group wanted to skip fourth period to go to the mall food court and get corn dogs. Again, I said no. I had a test, and I didn’t want to face the possibility of getting caught. Yes, I was lame. I’ve always been a rule follower, and breaking even the dumbest high school rules seemed like the end of the world. An insight into me is that I get my taxes done months early. I was the same person then but with the added pressure of knowing I had to make good grades to get into a college and get me the hell out of that small town. I wasn’t about to skip a test. This got me a second note in her secret dossier. Two over the span of two days. That was a lot.

While they were at the food court without me, they decided to have a sleepover at Melody’s. They conveniently forgot to tell me until they all arrived at school the next day with their overnight backpacks ready to go.

I was destroyed. I went from thinking those girls were the only reason to be alive to wishing they would all die in a fiery car crash. I had such awful feelings of anger toward them, and I regret that. I wished the worst would happen.

And then it did.

My anger toward them is not what I regret most. Trust me. It gets way worse than that. But I guess regret is part of why I’m writing all of this. That and the guilt. Did I bring it on her? Was my anger toward her a part of why it happened? Did I want her gone so badly that I manifested it? I don’t believe in that manifestation bullshit, but sometimes it is an easy explanation. It doesn’t matter. I kept this all a secret for too long, and I have to get it out there. Just in case there are other girls like Melody.

Because I wasn’t invited to the slumber party, this part of the story is secondhand from several of the girls. The entire group went over to Melody’s. Her parents were never around, so slumber parties at her house meant you could stay up as late as you wanted and occasionally sneak out to go run around the golf course nearby. I don’t know why we wanted to do that, but the rebellion of running around the empty green hills in the moonlight seemed so infectious at the time.

This night, though, it was raining hard, as it tends to do in East Texas, and the clique was forced to watch TV using Melody’s dad’s old rabbit ears. Remember, it was the nineties in a small town. Certain people there probably still don’t have cable. But you could find some stations if you would just work those rabbit ears back and forth to find the right spot. That’s exactly what the group did. They found the various channels you’d expect—local shit, the networks, but then… something weird. Something they had never seen before.

On that little TV, there was a random channel, and it had music on it that they’d never heard. Something similar to what you’d see on late-night MTV at that time, when they played videos. There were a lot of live performances in front of small crowds, but nothing any of the girls could identify. Some of the recordings looked like they were shot on camcorders. They were hard to hear. Definitely not stuff that would draw enough attention to be on television. It was more like cable access or bootleg videotapes. This was pre-YouTube and smartphones, so it wasn’t like someone could just record these things as easily as we do today, when every stupid person at every show is Insta-streaming their horrible view from the crowd. These videos had to be done on an actual camera, then approved and put on television. That was a big deal. So, it was weird to see something this shitty on TV. But in spite of the poor quality, or maybe because of it, the girls were stoked.

Remember, I prided myself on being the musical one in the group. I mean, we all were, but I wanted to be the most knowledgeable. I wasn’t good at sports. I wasn’t rebellious. I was nerdy. Music was my thing. So, when they told me this story, I thought it was just to get under my skin. I’m telling you—teenage girls are fucking mean. They would do that. Just make something up to bother me. But over the years, I’ve realized it all had to be true. What other explanation is there?

The channel was the height of what they wanted—they had a direct feed that could make them the indiest, punkest listeners because no one had heard of this shit. They sat in front of the TV for hours, absorbing all that came on; they couldn’t believe their good fortune.

But as the night progressed, some of the other girls confessed to me that they felt as though the songs started to repeat, or at least sound as though they were repeating. The shitty quality of the videos started to get to them, and at some point, they grew bored. The bands were singing about the same thing. Some man. Not that he was the central figure in every song, but he was a part of it. That was the first time I heard about him—the Eyeless Man. They couldn’t tell me the exact lyrics, but they knew the songs mentioned him. They also knew that the singers sang about the Stack and something else called the Transfer. But the stories always seemed muddied. They couldn’t remember anything exactly.

So that was it. They didn’t know what the Eyeless Man looked like or even what the bands were talking about. The Stack. What could that even be? And trust me. I tried to get more information out of them. I wanted to know everything. They would try to conjure up the names of the bands when I asked, but mostly they would pronounce a weird Cthulhu-sounding combination of vowels and consonants that didn’t belong together. I presumed that meant black metal and went into a deep dive, but they responded to anything I found with a shoulder shrug. It was like they didn’t want to remember. There was something that they understood even then about those videos. You didn’t say the bands’ names because it felt… bad.

But not Melody.

Unlike the other girls, Melody did not get bored of the secret channel. As each girl gradually peeled away from the TV to get snacks, call boys or go to sleep, Melody stayed next to it, trying to take in every moment she could. She was addicted. I think this is when their allegiance to her started to wane. Her normal confidence and take-charge attitude went out the window.

Imagine you’re at dinner with someone, and they take out their phone to start scrolling Instagram. At first, you feel like maybe it’s you. Like maybe you’re boring. I mean, they are scrolling instead of talking to you. But pretty quickly, you realize—no. This person is boring. The person who starts scrolling at dinner instead of talking to you is just addicted to Instagram (and also kind of an asshole). There is nothing more boring than being addicted to Instagram.

This was the start of Melody’s downfall. She was becoming boring.

Post–slumber party, I spent some time trying to get back into Melody’s good graces. The group regaled me with stories about the evening, mentioning the channel, but for Melody, it was all she could talk about. I took that and ran with it, asking about these new bands she loved. I wanted to be the indiest of indie listeners too, just like her. More importantly, I wanted to be Melody’s friend again. I wanted her approval. Two birds with one stone. Learn about the bands and I would be back in, right? But she always said she couldn’t really remember. Again, I thought it was just an excuse. In Melody’s case, I was sure she just wanted to keep excluding me. But now I think she really couldn’t remember. There was something about the songs or the music that made you forget. Or made you be quiet about what you did remember.

The only thing she’d tell me was her favorite lyric: The Eyeless Man has his ways.

(It’s honestly not a very clever lyric. But she always was a little more goth than me, so at the time, I figured it was just a weird goth thing.)

I wrote down the song lyric. Over and over. I would write it on all my notebooks and papers as an attempt to get on Melody’s good side again. I could show her how cool I could be.

It turns out I didn’t have to prove anything to her. Because like the person who just scrolls Instagram at dinner, Melody was dull now. Whatever power she held over us started to disappear. And quickly.

The whole group dynamic changed. Melody wasn’t present and ready to take us all down a peg. She didn’t smile her weird smile and write in her secret dossier. I saw her writing in it occasionally, but it never seemed to be about us. She was in her own world. She was absent-minded and uninteresting, which is sort of the worst thing a queen bee can be. I didn’t have to be a needy follower anymore.

More importantly, there was a new opening—the group had lost its leader.

This is where my anger toward her for ousting me, not just from that slumber party but from so many times before, played out. I had so much built-up resentment. I was tired of begging for her to acknowledge my coolness, and the moment I realized I didn’t have to anymore, I felt free. And I knew how to never be subjugated again. I could use all of Melody’s tactics against her. Would this have worked if she hadn’t been so blinded by her obsession with these bands? I don’t know. Probably not. But there is no scorn like that of a rejected teen girl. It was my chance. I wanted her power.

As everyone started to feel like Melody was getting weirder and weirder, I began to plant seeds. Now it was me who thought her eyeliner looked crooked. It was me who thought she spent too much time worrying about what the jocks thought. It was me who said that I saw her stuffing her bra.

Awful shit. I know. The kind of stuff that I just knew worked. You plant seeds. You make the other girls question her godlike influence. At the same time, compliment their shoes. Let them borrow your records. Invite them all over and accidentally forget to invite Melody. Just like she did to me. True mean-girl stuff. The stuff you aren’t taught but you pick up as you watch other girls do it. And you don’t even know you know how to do it until you are actually the one not inviting the other girl to your slumber party. Deep down, though, I knew I could be the queen bee. I could outsmart them.

Just like the Eyeless Man, I had my ways.

So when Melody actually quit showing up to school, it took a while for it to click with us. I had spent so much time trying to get them to forget about her that I was surprised when I didn’t have to anymore. She wasn’t there for them to forget about. She was always cutting class anyway, we reasoned. We were better off not having to hear her obsess about trying to have everyone over to find that silly channel again.

Rumor was she wouldn’t leave the TV and her parents were worried. I only used this to fan the flames of my personal vendetta. I took the words that the cool kids always used against us and used them against her. Weirdo. Freak. What the hell is wrong with her?

I don’t think I need to say it again, but teenage girls are fucking mean. That included me.

I wanted her gone. And then she was. And that’s my fault, too. I’m going to lay it out for you and let you judge me how you see fit.

Writing this down has me thinking about the supernatural in general. Maybe all supernatural things are just our guilt manifested. We are able to justify the heaviness we carry with us by blaming it on ghosts or demons. Or maybe that’s what I want to think because the other possibility is too scary. It’s too insane to think that all this shit is real. I don’t know. This is the kind of stuff that takes years to sort out, but there aren’t enough therapy hours in the world to deal with what I did next.

Melody actually disappeared. She was gone. Not at her house. Not at school. No one could find her. At the time, I couldn’t give two shits. I was the leader of our little group of outcasts. The clique was mine now. I dictated every move, and the only reason Melody’s disappearance affected me was because I had no foil to pick on. I had no one to make me look good.

The whole town shut down. Sure, no one liked her family, but you don’t just lose a teen girl in a small town and not send the whole town out to look for her. So, everyone gathered. We divided the town into sections and joined search parties. We looked everywhere. We put up posters. It felt like it was all anyone could talk about. Just like the stuff you’d see on TV. We were all out to help. School was canceled. They talked about canceling some of the football games, but small Texas towns don’t cancel football games. Not even for a lost girl.

But remember, it was the nineties, a time when a black trench coat was a reminder to keep your distance (and soon would become something much worse). And Melody, she dressed weird. She cut class. She had bad grades. So as much as the town rallied, interest died off quickly when rumors went flying about where she could be hiding. Most people thought she ran away with an older guy who got her pregnant. Or killed herself. Both equally bad in an uber-Christian town.

We weren’t all sure. Or at least, that’s what we said. But I think we girls all kind of thought the same thing. It was about those bands and that channel. Maybe she left town to find the bands. Maybe she went to go find the source of the channel. But since we didn’t know the bands’ names, we couldn’t figure out how to follow her or even where to begin. Even when questioned by the police, we couldn’t help. What would we say? She watched a bunch of music videos and then decided to skip town? It was useless. Our group gave premature eulogies, held séances and did all the things teen girls know to do.

But nothing. No one found her. Not a trace. And I was okay with that at the time. Good riddance to a girl who had made my life hell.

I mean, sure, I had some sweet moments with her. She once bought me a pregnancy test when I was sure I was pregnant even though I had only had a heavy make-out session with a guy in a stairwell. (The nineties were not a great time for information on sex.) And she hadn’t even made fun of me. In fact, she said she would drive me to get an abortion if I needed one. And what else can you ask for from a friendship besides someone who would drive you to get an abortion?

I just thought she’d eventually show back up.

And then she did.

This is the part no one knows. No one. It’s hard to even write down, and it makes me feel things and have thoughts that I’ve spent years trying to suppress. I’ve pushed this shit down deep.

But here goes.

After Melody’s disappearance, my parents didn’t like that I was still walking home from school. They were scared of abductors or attackers or whoever took Melody. They weren’t wrong, but we also didn’t have much of a choice. I didn’t have a car, and the school was less than a mile away.

Plus, I liked walking. I still do. You notice more, and sometimes you find things along the way.

And that day, I found Melody. I fucking found her.

Goddamnit.

I was passing that abandoned shack that my friends and I sometimes frequented. It was that crazy time of year where it seems to get dark at 4:00 p.m. I had stayed at school late tutoring, and as I was walking home, I saw a glow from inside the house.

Now, I did not consider myself brave, but I was curious and, honestly, determined to embrace my new self. Going into the house was something the leader of a group did to tell her followers later. It wasn’t something a sheep did. And I had made the decision that I was the leader. Besides, we had all been in there before to sneak around. Just not after dark. So I went in. As I approached the house, there was a staticky crackle from inside. I already knew what it was. I had this feeling.

I went inside, and there she was. Melody. In front of that little TV with the rabbit ears from her house. It was on, but the screen was just snow, and she was staring straight at it.

I remember being so shocked that I didn’t know if I should say her name.

“Melody.”

Her posture told me that she would never hear my voice, no matter how loudly I spoke.

She didn’t turn. She didn’t move. She looked like… I can’t describe it. Like she hadn’t bathed in days but worse than that. Like she hadn’t closed her eyes in days. Like she couldn’t close her red-rimmed eyes.

And with her was her notebook. The secret dossier.

I inched forward, trying not to breathe in her very human smell. I thought of calling her name again but didn’t. She was miles away anyway. She was there, but she wasn’t. She was already a ghost.

I don’t know why I didn’t run home, get an adult, call the police, do anything.…

I did nothing.

No. Not nothing. I had one instinct, and it was to save my own ass. This girl who had terrorized me was right in front of me, and she needed me for the first time. But my gut said not to help her. She was already gone, and if I did help her, I’d go down, too.

Or maybe that’s what I say to myself to justify what I did.

There was only one thing that still had power to me about Melody. The fucking secret dossier. Her notebook. I could still be in power. I could know all her secrets. I could make her feel like she made me feel.

I grabbed the secret dossier. And I left her there. Just like that.

And no one ever found her again.

It’s my fault. That’s the heart of the story. The truth. I can feel bad for ousting her, for talking shit or for making people forget her, but what they don’t know is that I could’ve saved her. I could’ve even been a hero. I could’ve made her parents happy. I could’ve kept her alive. But that anger in me burned so deep that I thought maybe that was what she deserved.

When I walked by the house the next morning, there was no glow, no TV and no Melody. No one ever saw her again. I was the last.

But I had the secret dossier. It took me days to open it. I was going to say I found it on the side of the road. I still had a path to heroism. I could still give a clue that could lead to Melody. It had to have information on where she was and what she was doing. She wrote everything in there, right?

And I could look at it before I gave it over and read all the shit she had written about me. I could prove that I was right to dispel her from my universe. I just knew it would be full of bullshit that would justify my actions.

But days later, when I finally decided to open it, there was nothing like that inside. It was just filled with the same line over and over again: The Eyeless Man has his ways.

Over and over. Covering every single page.

The Eyeless Man has his ways. The Eyeless Man has his ways. The Eyeless Man has his ways.…

That should be impossible. She had that stupid notebook for years. It had band stickers on the cover from shows three years before (a lifetime as a teen). But every page was covered with those same words. Like she had never written down anything about us when she smiled. Like we never existed. Like, somehow, she had been writing about this man years before she had seen that channel.

Every. Single. Line. The Eyeless Man has his ways.

I guess he does. For Melody, it was addiction and binging. For me, it was power.

I was just a kid. A hurt kid who had just lost her friend. Not even her friend. More like her idol and her torturer. The girl who gave me a purpose. I made a huge mistake, and I knew it. I threw away Melody’s notebook and never talked to anyone about what happened. I was ashamed. I was an asshole. I was the worst friend.

And I spent a lot of years trying to pretend it never happened. Trying to just forget.

But then something happened recently that made me realize I hadn’t forgotten about it.

---

When I’m traveling for work, I love my Saturday downtime. I like to go to museums and new restaurants, but my favorite, favorite thing to do is to binge shows. I’ll go deep into an Amazon Prime or YouTube dive. Sit back and see where the next weird British baking show or true crime series leads me. I’ll let them play while scrolling my phone, and it feels like the most luxurious thing of all time. Screens. What did we do before them? Put something on the TV, scroll through Twitter and open the iPad with writing ideas. Insane, right? That amazing Venn diagram where addictive technology meets meaningless distraction.

This all happened when I was alone in Kansas City. And I was feeling alone. That kind of deep loneliness where you don’t know anyone and you wish a stranger would just start talking to you so you can be reminded that you exist. It’s the weird loneliness that comes with constant travel, starting new projects and, to an extent, success. I’m happy that I’m constantly onto something new. I’m my own boss and a lot of other people’s bosses. It’s a scary thing. After all this time, I have to say I still don’t feel as all-powerful as Melody was in high school, but I have the power I was craving all those years ago. Yet there’s nothing as powerful as a teen girl in high school. I stand by that.

On this particular Saturday, the loneliness and the bad weather in Kansas City had trapped me in my hotel room, and I started the binge process. Pajamas on, screens on, ready to be mindless.

I was down a truly great rabbit hole—some mix of nineties bands from my childhood alongside those skateboarding videos where guys hurt themselves in some serious way to be funny. Those videos should probably be illegal. After hours of watching, I was falling asleep when it came on. A song by a band—I couldn’t tell you the name—and it had the lyrics. The ones I had thought about for so long but then managed to just… forget. Until that very moment.

The Eyeless Man has his ways.

I sat up straight and stared at my laptop. I knew those lyrics. And what was more important was that I knew that singer.

Goddamnit if it wasn’t fucking Melody singing at me through the YouTube video. It had to be her. Aged a little, yes. But same eyeliner. Same hair. Same perfectly symmetrical face. And she was singing at me. Even though I knew… I fucking knew she was dead. I had left her for dead. She couldn’t be alive. Not after the way I saw her… one foot in the grave… when I abandoned her.

And what could I do but watch her? Listen to her. Listen in the way I refused to listen before when she was trying to tell me about those bands on that weirdo channel or when I left her all alone in that stupid house. Now I had to. I couldn’t look away.

She was singing. And she was power personified. She was sexy and interesting, and she commanded the screen. She was the woman I wanted to be.

She always had been. Nothing had changed.

That’s all I could tell you about the video. I don’t know where she was or what else was in the song. And then it ended just like that. Some other song started, but my mind couldn’t comprehend it. I was fucking haunted.

I tried to replay the video, but no luck. I started looking on the Internet for the things I had forgotten about for so many years. The lyrics. The bands. The channel. Melody’s disappearance. Only the last one turned up anything, and there had been no updates on it in twenty years. Time just slipped away. Mindless binging turned into obsessive watching. Searching for her. Searching for something. Anything. I had to find her. I had to make things right.

I was obsessed. I called in sick to work and canceled my flight home because I knew that if I moved out of that hotel, I would never be able to find that song again. I had to find her. I owed it to her. I took everything from her. I was responsible for all of it.

I stayed there for days. I ordered room service when I was hungry, but honestly, I wasn’t ever that hungry. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t shower. I didn’t move.

We switched places. Now I was the woman in the shack, staring at the TV, refusing to be found. I felt like if I just read enough pages about her disappearance or threads on weird message boards, someone somewhere would tell me what happened to her. Someone would know these lyrics. Someone would be as punk and as indie as we had been, and they would have found this channel, too. I started my own posts, website, Facebook threads about the Eyeless Man and Melody, but nothing turned up.

Then I found this podcast called Video Palace. It connected it all for me. The Eyeless Man and the way he creeps in. The way he might have used Melody’s weakness. The way he used her obsessions. That was me, and I knew it. I knew he had found me. I know it sounds insane, but then you hear something like that and it makes you… grounded. Connected. It made me at least understand that I wasn’t the only person going through this.

In the end, that’s all I found, though. I found Mark Cambria, and I learned his story and that’s something, at least. I found an explanation of sorts.

I wish that was the end of the story, that somehow I felt satisfied, but it didn’t go away. This obsession. It’s hers. The same as hers. I know it. Her obsession transferred over to me. Whereas once I only wanted power, now I want to know what happened to her. I want to know where she is. And, weirdly, deep down, I want to know whatever she found, because I want to be obsessed with it, too. I want him. He must mean something. Something incredible. Which, I think, is exactly what Melody wanted. It’s what they both wanted. They wanted me to fail. They wanted me to become obsessed.

Until I decided to write this, I never felt I could reveal what really happened. There was too much to lose. But after I found that video, I had to talk about it. Just for my own sanity. And for Melody. And what I did to her. Hopefully, it’ll keep someone else from making the same mistakes.

Now it’s me who can’t stop talking about these bands or these lyrics. I’m the one writing it all down. I can’t stop talking about him. I’m Melody. I’m lost and obsessed.

At the end of all this, Melody kind of won. I think about her now more than I did then. I want her approval. I want her power. I want her to be okay. She has power over me. After all these years. Whether it’s through guilt or addiction, she found a way to get me in the end. Or maybe he did. Or maybe they did together. They have their ways.