Obsession

A person can only take so much. 

I didn’t learn that lesson during my relatively short stint in a body on Earth; it’s a truth I figured out afterwards. 

There is life after death, you see. Or a half-life anyway. I will tell you a little about it but this story’s not really about that, or me, it’s about Penelope Johnson.

When you pass over, you can choose to take the risk and move on to the unknown straight away or you can continue on Earth as an observer for a time if you feel like you haven’t experienced all the highs and lows life has to offer. You have a guide who will come to you periodically to offer the option of moving on if you decide to stay and observe. They won’t tell you what the next phase is though, however many times you ask. I chose to observe, but after a time wandering everything began to feel hollow. I saw love blossom in the faces of strangers on dates, but my own heart always remained still. I watched people laugh and dance in the rain, but I would never again feel its gentle kisses on my skin. It was like biting into a perfect looking piece of fruit, only to find the inside crumbling tastelessly against your tongue; it was never going to satisfy me.

I was ready to tell my guide that I wanted to take the leap into the unknown when I first saw her. I was drawn to her like a moth to a flame, helpless against her magnetic pull. The existence I found myself in was muted and bland, but she was a burst of colour and hope, and joy. Not being able to interact with her in any way left a gnawing pit in my gut that I knew observing her would never quite fill, but I did it anyway. My guide came to me regularly, but I ignored their warnings and kept pushing them away. I was only nineteen when I died, and I’d only recently come out of the closet. I’d had crushes on women before, of course, and a few tepid dates but this was the first time I’d experienced love at first sight, it just sucked that I experienced it when I couldn’t do anything about it. I’m sure you’re thinking it, so I should point out now I’ve had some distance from the situation: I’m aware that I hadn’t felt any emotions for months, therefore I confused attraction and lust with love and I pinned my happiness completely on someone else. Emotional growth isn’t a straight road, okay?

For much of the time I observed her, I followed her everywhere. I watched her buying groceries, collecting medications, walking her dog. With her even the mundane looked magnificent. The place that I felt most guilty watching, but also couldn’t tear myself away from, was her therapy sessions. I’d never attended therapy while I was alive, I count myself lucky that I never felt the need, so watching hers was something novel and it sounds terrible but I was excited to learn her secrets. In her day-to-day life she seemed calm and happy, but she often seemed nervous before a session and would sometimes cry in her car afterwards even though she hardly ever did in the room. On those occasions, I would sit in the car with her and put my hand on her back and pretend she knew I was there and could feel my comforting touch. After a few minutes she’d dry her eyes, touch up her make-up, and plaster on a large fake smile that made my heart ache.

Most of her sessions seemed to focus on techniques for coping with her anxiety but on occasion her childhood came up. I pieced together that she’d lost her mother at a very young age and her father turned to drink. Drinking made him abusive, physically and emotionally. When I learned this, I wondered if her prowess at makeup was less a hobby and more something she had employed to cover bruises. As she grew up and began to fill out, as is of course natural for teenagers, he made sly digs about her weight, which led her to an unhealthy relationship with food. One of the few times she cried in the room was when she talked about feeling guilty for being relieved when he drunkenly ploughed his car into a tree at high speed and died before the ambulance could even get there when she was seventeen. By this point I had talked myself into believing I was her guardian angel, and I will admit to trying to track down her father on my plane of existence while she slept so I didn’t miss anything, but I was unsuccessful so I had to assume he’d decided to move on. 

As time went on and my obsession grew, I took my role as her guardian angel more and more seriously. When she talked in her sessions about the boy who took her to prom and ignored her resistance to his advances in his bedroom afterwards, I tracked him down. Although it hurt me deeply to spend any time away from her, I had to know what his life had become after crashing into hers in such a destructive way. It pleased me more than I care to admit seeing he had a soulless desk job he clearly hated, went home to an empty flat, and drank beer to fill the void. He had a toddler who he only saw once a week. Seeing her gave him a genuine smile, the only one I saw from him the whole time I observed him. This was the first time I realized I could still influence the living world in small ways. When I saw him happy, even just briefly, I burned with a white-hot rage. As I swung my fist towards his car wing mirror, in what I expected to be an impotent expression of my anger, the glass developed a small crack with a satisfying pop. I was still standing there, gaping at the destruction, when he swept by me to bundle his child into the car. He noticed the crack and almost swore but held his breath. He looked up and down the street but could see no obvious suspects, so he started strapping his daughter into her car seat. Her icy blue eyes stared straight into mine and she pointed at me.

“The pale lady did it, Daddy!”

He spun around but seeing no one he just laughed it off. As they pulled away, she swivelled in her seat and watched me for as long as she could. I guess it’s true what they say about animals and children being more attuned to the spiritual realm. When he came back that night I cracked his other wing mirror and, with a huge amount of effort, popped one of his tires. I waited around to revel in his anger the following morning, then left him to his underwhelming little life and went back to my Penelope.

Once I got a grip on my new “powers,” I used them solely to improve Penelope’s days in any small way that I could. I realized they were activated by any strong emotion, it didn’t have to be anger, so I could just focus on my affection for her. She made tea and forgot about it? I could heat it back up in the blink of an eye. She left her hair straightening iron on by mistake? I could turn it off and prevent disaster. Once, her dog managed to escape his lead at the park and I ran in front of him and grabbed his collar, yelling at him to stop. His quivering brown eyes surveyed me and he whimpered and headed straight back to Penelope with his tail between his legs. I didn’t feel great about that one but at least I got the dog back. He hadn’t seemed to notice me before that day but after that he was always on alert and would watch the corners cautiously and growl if he spotted me.

Actually, it won’t do me any good now but I should be honest and confess my poor behavior. I didn’t just use the “powers” to improve Penelope’s life. You see, after I’d been observing her for some time, her boyfriend moved in. Although they obviously adored each other, it upset me to see her happy with someone that wasn’t me. It didn’t feel fair that he was the one to feel the warmth of her, the thrill of tracing her curves, the one to make her back arch in pleasure. I know it was childish and petty, but it came out as misplaced anger towards him. I couldn’t bring myself to trust him with the girl I loved, so I used my powers for a time to make his life just a tiny bit harder. If he was sending an important message, I’d push the delete key or random letters to make him send typos. As easily as I could warm her tea, I could cool his to tepid disappointment. I would turn up the heat on the oven so he’d ruin dinner, trying to make him lose points with Penelope. This vindictiveness was the catalyst to my undoing. 

It’s hard to mark the passage of time from this side of life but my best guess would be that I had been following her for around two years before things started to go badly. I think if I’d known our time together was coming to an end the sadness would have crushed me into inaction, so I’m sort of glad I didn’t know. The first incident happened as we were walking to work, and it just felt like any other day. Our reactions to catcalling were very different. She didn’t even seem to notice any more, which added to my own frustration around it. I’d hated it while I was alive, it made me feel like men felt entitled to my body, and now that I was protecting Penelope it made me furious. Since getting my powers, I’d often attempted to trip a catcaller, or tip their drink on them, or some other simple annoyance. On this day though, for whatever reason, I had reached my limit and rage made me reckless. The catcallers that day were a group of men doing waterworks maintenance so when they barked their comments, which I can’t even remember now and it seems so trivial, I spun towards them and directed my boiling fury straight at the exposed pipes. One of the pipes blew apart and drenched the men with water at a surprising, satisfying velocity, causing them to yell and duck, unsuccessfully, for cover. 

I was only able to enjoy the calamity for a moment before I was hit with an awful sensation in my head. You know when you eat ice cream too fast and get brain freeze? It was like that but magnified by thousands. My vision swam, and I had pins and needles down my arms and legs. I hadn’t felt pain of any kind since I died, so it hit me all the more. By the time I recovered enough to see straight, Penelope had moved on out of sight. Although I still felt strange, not knowing exactly where she was felt worse, so I forced myself to rush on to her place of work to make sure she’d arrived safely. By the time I got there and saw that she had, I felt an overwhelming sense of exhaustion and what I imagine would have been breathlessness but as I didn’t need to breathe it was just an odd heavy sort of feeling in my chest. I was panicked by not knowing what was going on but too exhausted to do anything about it. I lay on the floor outside her office just watching people’s feet going in and out of the building and had restored enough energy by the time she finished for the day to walk home with her as I normally did.  

I knew using my powers drained me of energy, but I’d never experienced anything like that. The rational part of me wanted to talk to my guide about it but I knew they’d try to pull me away from Penelope and I couldn’t allow that, so I convinced myself that I’d just attempted something too big and if I laid off using my powers altogether for a few days I’d feel better. Maybe that would have been enough but soon my rage boiled up again and squashed the logical part of my brain. Penelope and her boyfriend had been arguing a lot, you see, and when he had a drunken night out with the boys and cheated on her, she was devastated and told him to leave. I was furious for her and while they were arguing, I went up to their bedroom and trashed all of his belongings. I ripped shirts, I tore pages out of books, I smashed his watch into pieces. As I stood there trying to recover with my head swimming and pounding, they came into the room and she screamed at him to collect his things. They were both struck dumb by the destruction they found. After the initial shock, he turned to Penelope demanding to know why she would destroy all his stuff. Of course Penelope hadn’t, but trying to tell him so made him angrier. Exasperated, she headed toward the door, but he blocked her path, grabbing her wrist sharply. He screamed she was a ‘crazy bitch’ and slapped her hard. I’m not sure if the words or the slap stung more.

Fat tears began to roll down her cheeks and I saw red. He was standing in the doorway. Penelope was just inside the room. In such a quick motion that I don’t think it was even a conscious decision, I walked directly through Penelope and shoved him in the middle of the chest with all the strength I could muster. He tottered at the top of the stairs briefly and his eyes filled with such terror that it pierced the fog of my rage. Realizing what I’d done, I tried to grab him, but I was too late. He bounced down the stairs, hit his head on the shoe rack in the hall at the bottom and lay still. Penelope rushed down the stairs so quickly I was sure she would meet the same fate. She called 911, and until they came she held his hand and talked softly to him but I think he’d already gone. At the hospital they pronounced him brain dead.

I had forced myself to go to the hospital to be with Penelope but once we were there the exhaustion I’d experienced before hit me like a tidal wave. I ended up having to stay at the hospital until the next day, as I physically couldn’t move to follow her home. Penelope was questioned by the police and although she hadn’t done anything, she was incredibly nervous around them and I feared she looked guilty. When I arrived back at her house, a woman I realized was the mother of Penelope’s boyfriend was banging frantically on the door and screaming about how Penelope was a ‘fucking murderer’ and how she ‘stole my precious son from me.’ I tried to push her away from the door, but I didn’t have the strength. The curtains in the houses on the street were all closed while this was happening, but one of the neighbors must have done the right thing, and the police arrived shortly after and took the mother away.

Over the next two days Penelope didn’t sleep. She ignored all calls but kept playing the vile abusive voicemails his mother left her and reading comments under posts about his passing on social media that may have made her seem guilty. She didn’t eat and drank way too much. 

Two days after his death she poured out handfuls of pills from the vials in her medicine cabinet, and lying on her bed, washed them all down with vodka. A person can only take so much. My rage had pushed the woman I loved to her breaking point. 

I tried desperately to pull the pills away from her mouth or tip them on the floor out of reach but it seemed I had abused my powers for the last time. I could no longer influence the living world. I lay next to her and sobbed as her eyes grew heavy. The bottle tumbled from her grasp, and she slipped away from me. The only small relief I have is that her passing was peaceful. I hoped our souls would be able to lock eyes for at least a moment, but it seems the initial discussion with your guide is a private moment, because all I saw was the light fade from her eyes. 

My guide found me there, still lying on the bed next to my love. I guess they found out about Penelope’s passing and knew I would be destroyed by it. I begged them to take me to her, I could wander with her or move on. They patted my hand gently and informed me that Penelope had chosen to cross over immediately but because of my actions I was no longer strong enough to follow.

My guide comes to see me regularly and sometimes another wanderer will cross my path so I’m not completely alone. But as time goes on even more of my energy leaves me. My heart went with Penelope and without it I’m shrivelling away to nothing. I don’t know if I’ll be here forever or if I’ll eventually just cease to be, but for now it’s mostly just me and my regrets on an endless loop in my head. Life is bland and colourless again and I know I deserve it.