Slender Man. Anonymous

      welcome

      Don’t take this personally, but I don’t like you very much.

      I don’t see the point of you, I resent the time I’m being forced to spend on you, and – to be honest – I just see you as an obligation, as something that I have to put up with until I can get rid of you.

      But that’s not going to be for a while yet, so to hell with it.

      Here we go.

      — — — —

       March 12^th

       Dear Diary …

      You see, that’s just stupid. Why would you address a diary like it’s the grandparent you only see a couple of times a year? I get that this is risky territory under the circumstances, but it seems to me that when you start talking to inanimate objects like they’re people then you’ve reached the point where you need to check that all your screws are fully tightened. But maybe that’s just me.

      Either way, let’s try that again.

      — — — —

       March 12^th

       Journal entry 1

      Better. Much better. When I hear the word diary, I think of a bright pink book with a felt cover and a little lock and a keyhole that lives under the pillow of some twelve-year-old girl whose heart is just so very full of hopes and dreams and secrets. Not a Word document on the desktop of a MacBook Pro that only exists because your therapist told you it had to.

      She thinks the act of writing this will be good for me, that it will help me keep things ordered and she thinks I might surprise myself. I guess there’s always a chance that she’s right, but I’m really not going to be holding my breath.

      It’s been a long time since I surprised myself.

      I have to see Dr. Casemiro once a week, on Tuesday evenings after school. My parents are making me do it. I’ve been having nightmares for a little while now, and my mom says I’ve been crying out in my sleep, although part of me thinks they just got tired of being one of the only couples they know who doesn’t have at least one child in therapy. I asked them why – if they’re worried about me sleeping properly – they didn’t just get me referred to an actual sleep therapist, and Mom told me that she thinks – and I’ll quote her now – That it’s always better to get to the root of what’s going on, and that it never hurts to give yourself an emotional roadworthiness test.

      I’m still not sure what she expected me to say in response to that.

      Anyway.

      I asked Dr. Casemiro what she wanted me to write about, whether I was supposed to keep an actual diary where I write down everything I do each day and every place I go and everyone I talk to, and she said that she wanted it to be an outlet for personal reflection, so what I put in it was entirely up to me.

      Which was really helpful, obviously.

      It must be such a weird balancing act, being a therapist. I get that the whole point is to try and lead people to realize things about themselves, rather than just tell them what’s wrong, but that relies on people being brave enough to look as hard at themselves as they do at other people, and I don’t know how many people are really, actually, that brave. People want easy answers, and they want pills that make them feel better.

      It must be especially weird these days, where you know that if you give a patient advice that turns out to be unhelpful, they’ll almost certainly sue you. That must really sharpen your professional focus, although I wonder if it makes you reluctant to actually take a position on anything. I wonder if that’s why she says “Let’s explore that a little further” about fifteen times every hour.

      In the end, I managed to get her to at least suggest a few things that she thought it might be helpful for me to write about: family, friends, school, how I spend my spare time. Nothing that I couldn’t have guessed myself, but you take what you can get, I guess.

      So fine. I’ll do what she says.

      You know how in movies and stories, the hero usually has some destiny that they aren’t aware of? Like how Luke Skywalker is destined to be a great Jedi and lead the Rebel Alliance to victory but he doesn’t know it because he’s living on Tattooine, or that Frodo is destined to destroy the One Ring in Mount Doom but he thinks he’s going to live his entire life in The Shire?

      There’s a whole academic theory about it: it’s called The Hero’s Journey. People who go from small lives to some great grand thing, where they become part of something bigger and more important than they could ever have imagined.

      I guess it’s why those stories work so well, because everyone wants to believe they’re more important than they really are, that any moment now some incredible thing is going to happen that turns everything upside down and they’ll breathe a massive sigh of relief because they always knew they were special, deep