On finding comfort through ‘American Horror Story’
By: Stephanie Dejak
It’s been a few months since we parted. We stayed up together until the early hours of the morning, absorbing every last drop of our time together. I cried when you left, but you urged me that you’d be back soon.
We met when I was twenty-two, a week before Halloween, which was only fitting. I curled up with you on my sister’s sofa while wrapped in a vintage blue sweatshirt, taking you in with wide green eyes. You were bewitching.
We met when I was afraid of everything. Afraid of the solo Greyhound bus ride that I’d taken back to North Carolina from Atlanta for the weekend, afraid of the schizophrenia diagnosis that had just shaken my younger brother. Afraid of living alone in a city that I didn’t know yet, afraid of walking past the MARTA station at night without a tightly gripped pink pepper spray in my hand. Afraid of the murderer that had stabbed a woman and her dog in Piedmont Park that July, only a mile from my new apartment. Afraid of turning up dead after a date with a man from Hinge. Afraid of loving someone again. Afraid of you.
I was drawn to you because you were everything I wanted to be. Scary and intriguing on the outside, beautiful and raw on the inside. We can’t deny that I am much kinder than you are. But if my smile was a little dimmer, if my height stood a little taller, if my bite was a little sharper – maybe I’d be more like you. Maybe I wouldn’t get hurt anymore, maybe I would stop spilling my guts everywhere. Maybe not everyone deserves to see that beauty and rawness that we share. Maybe it’s safer that way.
In retrospect, I guess you weren’t immediately bewitching. I didn’t give into that allure of yours that grabbed nearly everyone by the neck a decade ago. I wasn’t prepared for you then. As a scrawny twelve-year-old that was battling mean girls and divorced parents, I didn’t exactly have the stomach for gory gougings and ghost stories. My reality felt scary enough as it was. Perhaps you were just the right person at the wrong time.
My sister is the one to thank for warming me up to you, ten years later. Maybe it was our synchronized tensed shoulders as you rambled on about the rubber man. Or maybe it was the text messages that she and I exchanged about the Hotel Cortez that you so badly wanted to show me. I wouldn’t have given you a chance otherwise. I’ll be sure to thank her for the both of us.
After all, why would I have let you in, even at twenty-two? When every haunting interaction with ex-lovers was already keeping me up at night, when you had just as much power to hurt me, too? I knew better. I watched you slit throats without blinking, I watched you put bullets into brains without flinching – and yet, I was enthralled by you. The way that you made the buttery yellows and the cotton candy pinks of Florida in the fifties look so terrifying. The way that you made the coven of witches at Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies seem so comforting. The way that you somehow tied an apocalypse into a world of murder houses and warlocks. I don’t know how you did it. Maybe it’s because you’ve always been beautiful and brilliant and blood-curdling, all at once. I’m sorry that it took me so long to realize it.
I think you’re the love of my life. You make me laugh; you make me cry. You make me tense; you make me weak. You take a drink with me; you take a drag with me. You introduce me to fantasies that I never knew existed. But you’ve never, ever hurt me. You’re always there for me when I need you. If anything, you’ve mended a battered heart that’s somehow still beating. And for that, I’ll love you until my last days.
Come home soon, my dear. I miss you.
Forever yours,
Stephanie
