Dagne Tripplehorn
Night Monsters
Dec 03, 2012
My closet door is always open.
It's not that I love looking at my clothes and shoes and dusty suitcases. No, it's that monster. It's been living in my closets since I was old enough to be scared of monsters. It won't hide under my bed or in unused rooms. It's a closet monster. When the door's open it can't get out.
Except it does get out, in a sneakier form. It comes out of the closet and goes inside my head and sends tentacles down into my veins and arteries, folds in and out of my brain crevices, secretes monster juice onto my tongue. The monster is hungry, and only I can feed it.
The monster wants bread. Sometimes it wants meat, often it wants dessert. It wants something warm and doughy, something big and solid and chewy. I have tried to placate it with things that are crisp and crunchy, things that are liquidy and delicate, things green and things cold. The monster wants what it wants.
In the daylight it hides or sleeps. Or, for all I know, it goes to the other side of the world and inhabits some other soul's night. When my slice of the world grows dark, it comes for me.
I have cleaned my closet. I have cleaned my diet. I've tried to scrub the thing out of my mind with therapy, meditation, imagery, hypnosis, and talktalktalk.
Military strategy isn't my area of expertise, but I believe flanking maneuvers will weaken it. A two-pronged approach: Deprive it of fuel by stripping out hunger; and maintain scrupulous night-vision observation. I have to be aware of it at all times, because it can slip through the tightest defenses, the smallest openings, the briefest lapses. The monster is overwhelmingly powerful...yet there is one force that can kill it.
One silent weapon, a tiny, gentle weapon that penetrates the enemy, like water: undetectable to monster senses, wearing it down and backing it away drop by drop. Every night I delay it a second. Every night I push it half an inch further back. During the safe daylight hours I plan for the night. When night comes I am ready for it. I make it wait. I build my walls, I let the water drops wear it away, I move my forces ahead one step.
One day it will be worn to a handful of sand and I will blow it away. Until then, I plan, I observe, I make tiny steps into its territory. When it overwhelms me, I begin from where I find myself and advance bit by bit: learning it intimately, getting close to my enemy and closing in on my enemy. And I know that one grain of monster sand has the power to crumble my walls in an instant. I remain ever vigilant, and I will never surrender; I will never give up.
