She calls in the witching hour. Taps your window, plucks the swallowtail chrysalis sewn into your screen — you’ve long considered this an omen — and eats it. She lifts mottled hair from her neck, dark water sloshing between her long teeth. You mistake the refractions for truck headlights belonging to your father before remembering nobody is coming to save you. You imagine yourself as you once were — side stroking between fear’s needled legs in a river of your own making, searching for frogs you could employ in stage-less soap operas that were really just sexier and more tragic versions of your own life. It’s been a year since she brushed the caps of your knees while you barreled down southwest backroads, an open beer between your legs, blaring Talking Heads, feeling both defeated and invincible in your Instagram-therapist self-awareness. A year since fear pulled up your bank account in a Walmart self-checkout while you bought Halloween string lights on clearance. A year since she pressed measuring tape around your breasts, waist, hips in the belly of night — fingers pruned and cold. It’s been a year since you moved here, to Oklahoma, from West Virginia, in which time you’ve enacted your ritual of mourning. 

Outside, frat boys stretch on their roof, croon Phil Collins, court a breed of thoughtless oblivion. Somewhere close: a girl stumbles home in an orange mini-skirt, fumbling her keys. Fear presses a thumb to her split lip and tilts her head against your awning while she waits.

This isn’t the first time she’s shown up since you rejected her. Once, she came to your bartending job, hiding in the throat of your manager. You noticed her dirty fingernail poke outside the bow of his lip. You, you thought. But when you asked your boss, Am I doing this right? fear disappeared.

Another time, she rode into your unlocked house on the back of an old woman. She didn’t smell like herself, like damp earth and spring water. Her host reeked of cigarettes and piss — a scent worn by people who aren’t afraid to feed their need for relief. You screamed when you saw her swaying in the kitchen, hands curled by her sides. You told her she couldn’t stay. She looked up at you, blinked. Her face was unaffected, eyes glossy. She wandered into the living room, sat down on your cat-scratched couch, and sighed. She opened her purse as if searching for a stick of gum.

This is my house, she told you.

You called the paramedics, but they assured you this woman was just confused. After everyone left, you flapped your arms while spraying disinfectant onto the couch, feeling guilty. You, you screeched at fear, are doing too much.

Last week, she banged on your door while you were in the shower. It was past midnight. You’d just finished the closing shift at your brewery job. You were exhausted. But the rapping was urgent. As you rinsed, you watched your hair fall out and down the drain — a stream of yellow-white watercolor lines sliding off the edges of a canvas. The knocking didn’t stop. You shouted Wait into the hallway, soap drying on your shoulders, wrapped yourself in a towel. When you answered the door, nobody was there. You wanted to scream into the hazy street. Typical! You heard fear in the distance, laughing the grateful laugh of a friend who’s been invited back to the party after puking on the host’s couch.

Each time you catch fear, she tells you she’s trying to honor your boundaries while crying noiselessly — a silent film starlet. She wraps her delicate arms around herself during these confessions. Looks down, water dripping off her sharp chin. She doesn’t make a show of it — that’s how you know she’s sincere. This is one of the many reasons why ignoring her is so hard. This is one of the many reasons you still love her.

Now, you unlatch the window’s white lock. It’s performative, this letting. Her flesh slides through the mesh in miniature squares, gathers in a jelly the color of an old bruise. She seeps between the seams of glass and wood and into your lap. She pulls herself together, and when she places her forehead against your collarbone, you remember, for a moment, how hard being spineless is on a body. Her skin is bloated and robin egg blue. She looks how she’s always looked: as if she’s been held underwater, as if her thin limbs could be pulled apart and swallowed like playdoh you rolled around your mouth as a child. Beautiful.

Fear doesn’t ask questions. She’s always preferred listening to you talk. To paint your cadences in color. When you were thirteen, compulsively stacking chewed gum atop your toilet into a tower, fear spelled chartreuse on your steamed mirror. When you’d wake up mornings after getting fucked up, force-feeding your attic feelings to people you cared about, she signed like a portent. Heliotrope! Heliotrope! Heliotrope! After you came to in your boyfriend’s best friend’s bed, an open bottle of lube sitting on an ironing board, memory blackened, she wrote above his threshold in mud. Carmine.

Fear has hyperthymesia and likes to remind you of it. You resent her for this. 

Your white-walled room glows moss green. You think of a ViewMaster picture of the underworld clicked into place. Fear lowers the temperature to sea level. Rain falls from your ceiling in fat droplets. You sag into fear’s chest, touch the hair you asked men who didn’t love you to pull while you practiced martyrdom, the hips you tried starving into submission, the thighs your mother took wooden spoons to in the name of reformation. The places where hurt became something else, something fluid and wild and bodied.

Maybe it’s because you’re in your busiest year of doctoral coursework or because you’ve started drinking to fall asleep again or because the world keeps getting smaller and crueler and you can’t seem to place yourself within it, but you’re the one who initiates this séance, this post-breakup sit down. You’re glad you’re wearing your wash-worn Vote! shirt and holed tie-dye sweatpants. You don’t want fear to want you, to give her any ideas. But it hardly matters. You’ve always been a sucker for her. Her, with those cataract blue eyes that, despite your loose clothes, can see right through you. You remember reading about twin flames a year ago, mirror-souls, fear curled in your lap, milking your elbow. How one is always the runner, the other the chaser. Getting caught, you know, can feel a lot like being held.

What, you ask fear, is a cliche you live through?

She hums silently. The rain comes down faster, harder. She crickets her pointer and thumb, draws three silvery circles in the air. The lines foam and dissolve into each other, drop to the floor in a ring. You step inside. Pink carpet squishes between your toes. Creek water licks your ankles, dried leaves sticking to your calves as it rises from the ground. Fear peels off a piece of her bicep and molds a salamander. She dips it into the pool around your feet, somehow animating it. Fear cracks her neck and the salamander squirms in pain. The current quickens, tears the salamander’s tail from its body. You think of yourself, driving over a rickety low-water bridge away from your childhood house after fighting with your mother. How you shook, wept, white-knuckling the steering wheel, your heart sloughing off thick swaths of skin like scraps of fabric your mother saved for unsewn quilts. You watch as the amphibian regrows itself, its new tail thick and hardened. Fear runs a finger along its back. The salamander skitters beneath her shoulder and settles into the clay-like muscle it came from. You watch it melt, make fear whole again. She looks at you, brows furrowed, eyes half-mast and imploring.

What, you ask, if I can’t lose what’s lost?

Fear shakes her head and steps forward. You stiffen. A series of holes burst through your walls. Murky water rushes from plaster wounds — the voices of your parents, sisters, once-beloved, harmonizing in A-minor. If you choose to remember us like that, I can’t stop you…That never happened…Are you hearing yourself? Do you really not remember what you did? The sound of your first writing mentor cuts through the chorus and each hole grows wider. Good, wonderful writing requires two things: a verbal imagination that throws up great stuff, and a critical intelligence that knows how to fashion that stuff into a compelling whole. You’ve got the first thing.

Fear stumbles back, digs from the side of her wrist and tries plugging up catastrophe. A nervous reflex.

You hate it when this happens, when you accidentally break her heart.

You realize then you have never told fear you are sorry.

She gestures towards you, knee-deep in the reservoir your room’s become. She taps her chest as if assuaging hewers in a collapsing mine.

We’re okay. 

The floodwaters reach your hips. Your nightstands tip, knock your weed bowl and sleeping pills and remote into the stream. Empty chocolate wrappers and workshop feedback letters float from beneath your bed. A card featuring a dancing Snoopy your mother sent you a few months ago pulps, the ink from her note swirling around you — my deepest desire is for you to be happy -— joy-filled — cup overflowing — Your phone bobs in the far corner, lighting up with texts from your sisters, your beloved, your friends. You try swimming to it, to them, but fear grabs your ankle up from the cerulean below. She pulls you back to the center of your room, orients you. You struggle, but both of you know who the stronger of the two is. It’s easier, letting her move you for you.

What, you ask quietly, is enough?

Fear touches your mouth, cocks her head. You hesitate. You don’t know if you’re ready to do it — to allow yourself to feel what you feel, to remember. To grieve. Your house is submerged; your doors strain, bow out against the flood. The water reaches the dusty fans. You tread and tread, prolonging the inevitable, trying to ghost your ghost. You go under. You open your mouth. Fear climbs inside.

Your limbs grow light. You feel her travel behind your ears, your play-scarred knees. Brightly bound books swirl alongside Battleship pegs and Clue pieces. The red-breasted devil figurine your beloved got you on a trip to OKC to prove that he is, in fact, paying attention, the movie still of Jennifer’s Body your friend gifted you for your dreaded birthday, the Beanie Baby lamb your parents bought you so you might cling to something soft as a child — suspended in speckled haze. You hold your breath. Your chest grows tight. There is, you think, so much to be grateful for. A lump builds in your throat. There is, you think, so much at stake.

Fear pushes at your ribs, your lungs. She never left, really. She’s been hiding there all along. You squirm, try kicking towards the surface, but fear works against you. You want to apologize to everyone you’ve ever hurt. You want to not be hurt, never have been hurt. You want the impossible —a new body, a clean slate, a pane of glass through which only light passes.

Fear leads you to the mirror hanging on your wall. Your heart quickens and you close your eyes. Fear lifts your hands to your neck. You feel the slick ridge of an organ you didn’t know you had. You look at yourself, at fear. You are both unrecognizable and familiar, a self-portrait blurred strange with a low-shutter speed. You are a creature of both/and. You are your body, the medium. The revenant.

Fear spreads your webbed fingers and toes for you. You glow like a warm lamp tucked beneath hand-sewn quilts. Bubbles erupt from the corners of your mouth, escaping to make room. For what’s necessary.