Intrusive thoughts

or, what if I can make all the bad things happen just by thinking about them?

6 days after he died, his Instagram account suddenly announced he was active right now. That would be so like him, ghost Daniel resurrecting so that he could read what people really said about him after he’d gone so that he could then silently log out again. Irrational as it is, I worried about whether I’d get a message from the ghost. Of course I knew it wasn’t really him but what if the person who now had his phone read the messages and saw that one of the very last things he said was how angry he was at me. The last time we interacted I had pushed him to the point of rage and he wanted nothing more to do with me.

He had a year and a half to forgive me. I lasted three months of a self imposed ban to leave him alone before I messaged to try and re-establish contact that never came. The truth was I guess we had nothing to talk about but his cancer. He was surprisingly happy to share every terrifying cancer detail but nothing else. It’s as if when he told me his news he drew a picture of him, me and cancer with a circle around it, meaning anything outside that zone ceased to exist. Every attempt I made to discuss something else was quickly shut down. I’m terrible at small talk but everything I tried failed, or confirmed that who we both were now would not be people who had anything in common. For example, I think he didn’t like dogs. The only other person who I knew that didn’t like dogs (or any animals), sample question: what’s your favourite animal? Answer: an Axolotl was one of the worst people I had ever met. Let’s just say that there’s a reason that serial killers start off harming animals.

Sometimes I think about what my partner would make of my phone if I die before him. Whether he would search through my browsing history with each letter of the alphabet - whether the results for “y” would default to youtube or youporn. It’s simultaneously such a strangely intimate but ultimately commodifiable resource. You are your data which someone else owns and sells on. Perhaps he will stumble across the audio file I made on a particularly desperate night setting out my wishes for what should happen when I am gone. Or the notes I have composed that ended up not being messages I would have sent. Or the other notes I composed to list the ways I didn’t measure up in the year me and my partner met:

• Turning main light on in living room at his

• Not drying feet after showering

• Mixing tea bags

• Not smoking rollies

• Making lists of negative things

The very worst thoughts though, I have never written down. The truth is, I’m scared to. I can’t help but think that if I did I would somehow end up making it real. If I made it real I’d either have to face up to it, stop avoiding it, or it would actually happen.

I can’t remember if he smoked before he met me. I know I did because I had decided to take up smoking at the age of 17 because my boarding school failed to give me adequate care following a flu outbreak and I ended up with pneumonia. I hated my life and I hated myself and I had hated cigarettes for so long that the worst thing I thought I could do at the time was start smoking. Classic teenage logic right?

Am I the reason he’s dead? Did I make it happen? Have I stopped smoking? Reader, I will let you guess the answer to that last question.

Self help books tell you that you have the power to change your life, to think yourself happy. If that’s right, surely the opposite is true though? I spend so much of my time worrying, thinking I am making all the bad choices, finding out that the worst things have happened and then wonder, what will it take for me to change? Will I think myself into an early grave or just keep going, keep going until it’s beyond my control and then there he is, reading my phone after the fact. Katy logged in. But gone.