Have you ever noticed? In that time just before you go to sleep, when everything is dark, and you are left alone with your thoughts, you are never really alone. Because in that darkness, there is something there waiting, watching. You can feel its breath on your toes, and its the fastest you move, your feet are diving under the blankets no matter how hot you are, because you are afraid.

You wonder is it a ghost? Is it real?

But here is the secret I am afraid to tell. Sometimes, I think that the monster is me.

I think I know what it is. When you were a child, did you have an imaginary friend? I did, I had many, perhaps too many. I was a lonely child. But I grew up and some how I’ve lost or forgotten my imaginary friends. I can’t quite remember what they looked like, or what they would look like now. I barely remember a name or their voice. In fact, I remember so little that my imaginary friend is now a ghost, a faint memory. That thing we feel at the quiet moments, the thing watching us in your sleep is the ghost of those forgotten friends.

What do they want now? To be seen or heard? To be known? To be loved? To be the friend they were or to get revenge, for it is after all our own memory, our growing up that killed them.

It is the child we were, the one we barely remember that we wish we could become again watching from the corner of the room, asking what have I become? Who am I now?

Do the answers scare you? Or is it the questions, the ones we cannot answer?

I am the monster waiting at the end of the bed, the forgotten memories, the child hoping to be so much more, angry they are so much less. I am the thing waiting in the darkness, my own worst enemy, my own monster.