Sam Moe
Entity
I can’t seem to tell my mother about my PTSD. Each time we are on the phone, she tells me I have trauma. She says to heal from my past experiences, I need to work on myself. I tell her I don’t know what she’s talking about, though she knows I don’t want to deal with things. Really, I don’t want to deal with her not believing me. My mind, body, and soul are exhausted from telling these stories repeatedly, begging for empathy. I am tired, to my bones. I am tired of being tired. I feel the continuous repetition of these statements is unhelpful. What was it Gertrude Stein said about repetition in poetry? We are being meaningful. I repeat myself because it is an innate facet of my existence to do so. It is life-affirming.
As I begin this essay, I am finishing Smile 2, wondering what type of entity I would be haunted by. A poltergeist, perhaps, or a demon. I watch between my fingers as Skye thrusts a microphone into her right eye. She dies smiling, body collapsed on a bright blue stage. She spent the movie begging people to believe her. Like Skye, I learned long ago I fawn and freeze, fawn and freeze, back-and-forth like a bow cut saw.
*
After a cursory search, I find others have been triggered by this movie. The director intended for the film to trigger its audience.
There are several scenes of the main character’s car accident which are so haunting and real I close my computer screen. Her feeling of being stuck. The stickiness of being covered in your own blood. All I can think while watching this is, I’ve been there; this is my body.
The memoir is a struggle. I fear my reflections on the main character’s experiences and my own life with C-PTSD will come off as phony. Hurtful. But I will try anyway, because I am hiding in my office at school, and I must get better at representing myself. After all, the piece doesn’t need to immediately leave my hands and fly off into the literary magazine void. Why must everything I write be sent off for publication in seconds? Am I incapable of rest? But I already know the answers to these questions. Rest is difficult, if not impossible for people with PTSD. I am constantly sending my work off to speak to someone, somewhere, who might understand. I am hypervigilant, on-edge, sleep-deprived. I see connection; a stranger, perhaps, who might stumble upon my essay and feel a connection with me. Our energies can meet across the cosmos, combusting like dead stars, littering the ground with stories strong enough to feed the earth all winter.
*
My grandparents immigrated to the United States because my grandmother was starving.
Correction: she was starved, on purpose, by her husband’s sisters. When they arrived in New York City, they switched apartments three times before settling on a railroad-style building on the upper west side, where my mother would grow up. And when she became old enough to walk to school by herself, my mother would stop by la tienda on the corner and purchase penny candy and snacks. Something about her appetite was off, but no one knew words for disordered eating or restrictive food intake disorder. And when she was older, a few years before I would finish my PhD, my mother learned she was missing half the bone mass in her jaw. This is a story I have told before. This story will exist long after I am gone. In a family of women with eating disorders, I carry their trauma with me in my jaw and in my body. I am afraid of dentists, teeth, breaking, concrete, shards. I am afraid of the Smile Entity, whose twisted red fingers rip apart people’s jaws so he can climb inside and force the host to kill themselves. This essay is not a metaphor.
*
When I was younger, a cluster of five men physically and sexually abused me. Their names do not belong anywhere. Their faces are erased from my version of time. Some of this trauma involved my jaw. Some of this trauma involved the rest of my body. I did not know for a long time to call any of it rape. Words like coercion and assault were unknowns in my mind, voids where pain gathered and corroded against my flesh. I did not know what to call these stories. Instead, I begged. For strangers to befriend me so I could seem like I had friends. Maybe then they would stop abusing me in the halls of school. I befriended a girl in my art class who had bright green pot leaf earrings and curly brown hair. We were both seventeen and she was dating a man twice our age. He, too, had sex with me. With each new interaction came a new cave in the folds of my brain. In each cave is a monster. Sometimes these monsters are called men, other times they are called wicked. No one used words like grooming. I wonder if any words were used at all.
I remember crying. To my mother, to my ex-boyfriends and ex friends, in the office of the guidance counselor. I cried to the detective, hired by my mother, who thought I was on drugs. As her story goes, the detective had been following me and my ex around while he sold drugs in Ayer, Massachusetts. I wonder why no one questioned the age gap. They only wondered if I was
using drugs; I was not.
*
On a weekend in April, I help a colleague to host a conference at our school. We invite a local poet who wants us to emphasize our vowels more. She gives us various jaw exercises, encouraging us to let our mouths hang open and slack. You might feel yourself going numb, she instructs. That’s normal. How is numbness in the jaw normal, I wonder? I don’t want to do the activity, so I fake a coughing fit and excuse myself to the hallway. When I return, I pretend I am dehydrated, drinking half a bottle of water. My colleague shakes his head at me from the podium, likely disappointed I am not participating. If I told him what happened, would he believe me?
The problems Skye is having are not limited to no one believes she is being followed by the Smile Entity. During dance practice for her tour, she moves her body in a way which triggers chronic pain in her back. Both her stomach and back bear scars from an excruciating car accident in which she was the sole survivor. I watch the scenes in which her scars show, clutching the areas on my body which are scarred or currently in pain. On a regular day, I fall somewhere on the middle part of the pain scale. On bad days, I try to avoid school. If I feel obligated, I will teach, but I’ll sit through the session. I try not to give too much information to my colleagues. They wouldn’t believe me, after all. Thus far in my life, barely anyone has. Take, for example, my Chair. We walked into work together today. He waited for me in the parking lot. We made small talk. Once inside, I lingered at the foot of the staircase. He asked what I was doing, and I explained I was feeling a bit of pain. Aw, he sing-songed. Poor baby. Instead of taking the elevator, I followed him up the stairs, made up lies about wearing the wrong shoes by accident, getting pain from thin soles. Wondered why I couldn’t tell him the truth. The thing about being disabled is able-bodied people will make up rules and restrictions for you if you’re visibly disabled. And they will make up stories in their head about you if you’re invisibly disabled.
I am tired of trying to prove my pain to other people. I have often thought about purchasing a cane, uncertain if I will need it. The times I walk through the halls with my hand against the wall to steady myself, I think about how foolish I’m being. I need relief. Instead, I fall into the pit of ableism, just like how I was raised by my family who don’t believe in medical treatment. My mother, who suffers from an eating disorder she nicknamed Patricia, explains to me I can “cure” my chronic illness by eating only leafy greens and nuts. What about seafood? I ask, remembering how my primary care doctor told me to eat a Mediterranean diet as it was good for my inflammation. That’s dangerous, my mother said. Do you even know what lives inside fish?
The Smile Entity already lives partially inside Skye. It feeds her hallucinations, dragging her body through PTSD-flashbacks of her car accident. In bed one evening, she imagines her friend is a car blaring its horn, bright headlights zoning into her eyes. In the hospital the next day, Skye awakens to find she’s on IV fluids. Her mother tells her she was found passed out with a concussion on her apartment floor. Skye tries to tell her mother what is happening, and her mother doesn’t believe her. I like to think even if I knew Skye, and lived in this world, I would have believed her. Even if I couldn’t see the monster following. Wouldn’t I?
*
Upon rewatching Smile 2, I begin to ponder how horror movies remind me a lot of rape culture. Before you tell me I’m making too much of an associative leap, I want you to think about how you are probably related to a rape survivor. You work with rape survivors. You may have experienced trauma in your life which you also discount. Society makes fun of survivors before it allows them to be killed by the system. Recently, Alabama put forth a law arguing for the jailing of women who miscarry. Under this law, women who are raped or abused will still be punished as “murderers” because, according to the law, they “should have left” their abusive circumstances. Even writing this essay feels reckless. I cannot imagine what journalists feel, center stage for these horrific events, laws, history. How difficult must it be to report without emotion attached to language. And can you trust your reader to imbue meaning into your language? Can you trust your reader to not twist your stories into sharp words to use against you in an argument? Can I trust the people in my life to hold my story gently.
*
Afternoon. A burst of sunshine pools on my desk. A colleague of mine sits in my office. We tell stories about last semester, during the 2024 election. Our students were having a hard time. The students in my class read James McBride’s Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and spent several class periods arguing about sexual violence and consent. The class were almost all in agreement: they thought women lied about their rape cases.
Well, of course, some of those cases are lies, my colleague says after I recount this story. There are probably tons of misreported cases. But that doesn’t erase the fact so many true cases.
Upon telling this to my therapist, she becomes enraged. Should I tell him more people make up break-ins than they do rapes? Tell him that next time you talk to him! She tells me the people I work with are behaving inappropriately. I am attempting, slowly, to respect myself and my boundaries. I realize she is right; some of them are more colleagues than friends.
After therapy, a student comes by my office for an essay extension. I have closed my door to process my session and am in the process of journaling when I hear their soft knock. We sit and talk about their semester is going. The student lets me know one of their family members is in the hospital, and is it okay to tell me more information? At first, I am hesitant. Hours earlier, my therapist told me my emotional boundaries were crossed when students got too close. I told my therapist it was difficult to find the words when a student was crying. How to tell them I couldn’t be their therapist felt a herculean task. Wasn’t I a student who cried in school? Didn’t I beg my professors for help?
I tell the student it’s okay to share, but I find myself holding back an emotional response. I nod, offering a few words of support before asking how I can help them. We have a brief conversation. They tell me stories about how their family member grew up poor and it is deeply affecting their health. The systems she lived in perpetuated violences and left her with mini-strokes and herniated disks. Her body is in constant pain. I think back to my own mother, whose eating disorder started because she couldn’t afford meals during childhood. I think about my own eating disorder, contemplate sharing this with the student, then don’t. Boundaries.
Sometimes I feel like my mother knows I also have jaw trauma. When I was younger, she used to jab her crimson nails in my face, grabbing my mouth when I was disobedient. I only have partial memories of this, reclaimed from months of EMDR therapy.
*
I have been thinking about the Smile Entity for weeks. Upon first learning about this movie, I was too afraid to watch, and spent hours on Tumblr, pouring over horrific images of the creature’s many stacked mouths and exposed flesh. I consumed fanart of the monster and the main character. When starting physical therapy for my pelvic floor, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about the monster. What’s it like having pelvic floor therapy? my partner asked one evening. I responded by showing him a gif of when the Smile Entity possesses a woman. He shuddered, visibly distraught. I don’t think I could go through the same experience.
For weeks, the entity becomes an obsession. I lay awake in bed, thinking about what it might be like to be possessed by a demon. In the bathroom at school, I noticed a young student smiling at me before ducking into a stall. The movie was making me paranoid, and I had never even watched the trailer. Now I’ve seen it, all I can think about is grief. The character’s grief over her car accident, her hallucinations of killing her mother, instances of trauma she endured throughout the film. It is impossible for me to look past her wealth. She is thin and white, with good teeth and expensive jewelry. Trauma loomed in the background, much the same way mine does. I feel it even when I’m not experiencing flashbacks. I’ve found lately whenever I have periods of calm, I am wondering in the back of my mind when I’ll get bad again. How soon until I return to weeks of despair, when I can barely speak to my colleagues and friends because I have climbed so deeply inside my psyche. How long until I am once again covered in my own blood.
Things are uprooting in my life. My relationship is falling apart, and my job keeps me up at night. I no longer feel as though I can trust students or colleagues. I worry our institution will be dismantled. I think often about the life I ran from, the things that happened to me, and the person I once was. I fear the past will come hurtling back. My mother encourages me to move in with her and to leave this state where they don’t believe in the rights of multiply marginalized people.
Is New England any better? Memories of peers calling me the f-slur come rushing back to my mind. Moving back home would also be an abandonment of myself. To admit I might return to the place where I almost took my life feels dangerous. Even visiting for holidays seems like a mistake. Each time, I must sleep in one of the two beds I was raped in. The house is navy-hued and half-encircled by forest. Down the street is conservation land; the same area where those boys took me outside and stole everything from me. It happened again and again over the past decade, but I find all I can think about is what they did. How they did it. Their hands and jaws and tongues and everything else.
*
I despise the Smile Entity remaining invisible to anyone not infected by him. It terrifies me that every character who dies by him is seen as having committed suicide. No one in the movie seems to question what kinds of circumstances led up to these deaths. No one questions the systems of oppression, how difficult it is to battle addiction, or how insidious post-traumatic stress disorder can be. As I write this, I can hear my colleagues’ voices in my head. Why write about horror movies like this if you’re just going to write memoir? How campy was this movie? It’s just a demon; it can’t hurt you. This isn’t a metaphor for PTSD.
I think about how this essay isn’t a metaphor but a story of my life and by proxy, my body’s reaction to what I deem to be a valid source of research (i.e., the film itself). I think about how oral storytelling is not as respected as alphabetic text. I think, above all, this essay could be a dream. This essay could be a puddle. A warm meal. The stove on a winter’s day. A hug. Forgiveness. Anything but what it is, which is a witness to trauma. Again, I am stuck staring. But I know if I don’t write through what happened to me, then these stories will take control of my life. They will yank open my jaw, possess me, and then some. There will be consequences. I do not want those consequences. I do not want possession. I do not want to be reminded of the hurt in my mouth.
As I write this, my partner has cracked his tooth. I have yet to ask him how. I don’t want to remind him of his pain. For the first time in five years, he has gone to the dentist. He will need more dental work. I am both afraid of what he will have to endure and afraid of his oncoming mood changes. When faced with aversity and stress, he often spills over, taking it out on me. Last night, when I first heard he had injured himself, I went to the gym. I apologized later, for not being there to take care of him. That’s totally fine, he said. There’s nothing wrong with working out on a Tuesday night. But there was something wrong. I am afraid of my partner, even though I still care about him. In the past two weeks, we have become distant from each other. I am dealing with a circumstance at work in which another student has filed a complaint against me. I have yet to see this complaint, but the student and I avoid each other. We walk down the hall and act like the other doesn’t exist. We are not ships in the night but snakes. I don’t want to be a snake. I want to be a dream, a wish, a hope, a feather, a pillow. Perhaps I would like to be a clock or a mouse or a piece of dryer lint. I would like to be healed.
I tell my therapist about the student. Then I tell her about how I spent the weekend working on a conference with my colleague, only to endure him telling everyone I only did “some” of the labor. This same colleague calls himself my friend. He also calls me loud. Other things he has called me are a parrot, a bird, a hyena, an owl, and other animals I cannot immediately recall. His purpose in doing so is telling me I am too much. I take up space when I shouldn’t. He once told me my trauma was a flood and why could I not be a river instead. He told me I was annoying. I responded by telling him I loved him.
fawn
/fôn/
noun
1. A girl alone in a field with a threat.
2. The way I contort my body and mind at all hours of the day.
*
At first, Skye doesn’t believe there is a monster pursuing her. After witnessing her friend taking his life, Skye begins receiving cryptic text messages from a man who claims he has been tracking the Smile Entity for months, concluding the only way to stop the monster is to kill its host.
When my therapist first told me what I experienced in high school was rape, I didn’t believe her. Since first having taught this information about me, to me, years ago, I have switched therapists three times. My current therapist doesn’t need more than a brief amount of information before telling me she believes me. After I detail one short story about abusive things my ex said to me, she puts her hand up to halt me.
That’s abuse. you realize that, right? That’s toxic.
I don’t know how to react, so I start crying.
In our EMDR sessions, my mother appears as a literal monster. Sometimes she is a soundbite, electric yellow and leaping across the room. Other times she appears with long hair spilling over the floor, her face obscured. She is sobbing in the corner of my father’s kitchen. She has too many teeth. There is something wrong with her body. Every ten seconds, my therapist pauses me to ask what I am seeing and feeling. My mother is here again, and she is a monster, I try to explain.
Okay, stay with that. My therapist starts the EMDR buzzers again and I close my eyes. In earlier versions of this essay, I wrote that my therapist closed my eyes for me. Even though this didn’t happen, it strikes me as odd. Even in reflection, I am not in control of my own body. I remember and misremember and remember like tangled wires, body sparking and snapping at the wrong times.
Sometimes, I do not believe my mother is a monster. I have so much misplaced compassion for her, I do not know how to hold her accountable for what she put me through. So much fear over others who have hurt me.
When one of my high school exes approached me while in AA, I immediately forgave him.
Are you sure? He is a year older, still wearing faded Vans and jeans with holes. His eyes are arctic blue.
Of course. You didn’t mean it, right?
There is only consumption in the world of the Smile Entity; it lives for blood.
*
In some versions of EMDR, I am a child holding my current self’s hand. My child-self is six. She is always angry.
Have we stopped hurting ourselves yet? she asks one session.
Not yet, but we’re working on it. I am crying in the daydream before realizing I’m crying in therapy. My therapist congratulates me on a job well done.
If I could go back in time, I would gently guide my nineteen-year-old self away from my ex. I would sit her in the warmth of my kitchen, make her a mug of tea, and hold her hands while explaining everything. I would tell her things are not her fault. And I would urge her to leave. Run, quickly from the cold place. From the house that will continue to eat you alive if you stay. I like to think I wouldn’t push my future self away. I hope I would reckless and confident and above all else, brave enough, to believe myself.
As I begin this essay, I am finishing Smile 2, wondering what type of entity I would be haunted by. A poltergeist, perhaps, or a demon. I watch between my fingers as Skye thrusts a microphone into her right eye. She dies smiling, body collapsed on a bright blue stage. She spent the movie begging people to believe her. Like Skye, I learned long ago I fawn and freeze, fawn and freeze, back-and-forth like a bow cut saw.
*
After a cursory search, I find others have been triggered by this movie. The director intended for the film to trigger its audience.
There are several scenes of the main character’s car accident which are so haunting and real I close my computer screen. Her feeling of being stuck. The stickiness of being covered in your own blood. All I can think while watching this is, I’ve been there; this is my body.
The memoir is a struggle. I fear my reflections on the main character’s experiences and my own life with C-PTSD will come off as phony. Hurtful. But I will try anyway, because I am hiding in my office at school, and I must get better at representing myself. After all, the piece doesn’t need to immediately leave my hands and fly off into the literary magazine void. Why must everything I write be sent off for publication in seconds? Am I incapable of rest? But I already know the answers to these questions. Rest is difficult, if not impossible for people with PTSD. I am constantly sending my work off to speak to someone, somewhere, who might understand. I am hypervigilant, on-edge, sleep-deprived. I see connection; a stranger, perhaps, who might stumble upon my essay and feel a connection with me. Our energies can meet across the cosmos, combusting like dead stars, littering the ground with stories strong enough to feed the earth all winter.
*
My grandparents immigrated to the United States because my grandmother was starving.
Correction: she was starved, on purpose, by her husband’s sisters. When they arrived in New York City, they switched apartments three times before settling on a railroad-style building on the upper west side, where my mother would grow up. And when she became old enough to walk to school by herself, my mother would stop by la tienda on the corner and purchase penny candy and snacks. Something about her appetite was off, but no one knew words for disordered eating or restrictive food intake disorder. And when she was older, a few years before I would finish my PhD, my mother learned she was missing half the bone mass in her jaw. This is a story I have told before. This story will exist long after I am gone. In a family of women with eating disorders, I carry their trauma with me in my jaw and in my body. I am afraid of dentists, teeth, breaking, concrete, shards. I am afraid of the Smile Entity, whose twisted red fingers rip apart people’s jaws so he can climb inside and force the host to kill themselves. This essay is not a metaphor.
*
When I was younger, a cluster of five men physically and sexually abused me. Their names do not belong anywhere. Their faces are erased from my version of time. Some of this trauma involved my jaw. Some of this trauma involved the rest of my body. I did not know for a long time to call any of it rape. Words like coercion and assault were unknowns in my mind, voids where pain gathered and corroded against my flesh. I did not know what to call these stories. Instead, I begged. For strangers to befriend me so I could seem like I had friends. Maybe then they would stop abusing me in the halls of school. I befriended a girl in my art class who had bright green pot leaf earrings and curly brown hair. We were both seventeen and she was dating a man twice our age. He, too, had sex with me. With each new interaction came a new cave in the folds of my brain. In each cave is a monster. Sometimes these monsters are called men, other times they are called wicked. No one used words like grooming. I wonder if any words were used at all.
I remember crying. To my mother, to my ex-boyfriends and ex friends, in the office of the guidance counselor. I cried to the detective, hired by my mother, who thought I was on drugs. As her story goes, the detective had been following me and my ex around while he sold drugs in Ayer, Massachusetts. I wonder why no one questioned the age gap. They only wondered if I was
using drugs; I was not.
*
On a weekend in April, I help a colleague to host a conference at our school. We invite a local poet who wants us to emphasize our vowels more. She gives us various jaw exercises, encouraging us to let our mouths hang open and slack. You might feel yourself going numb, she instructs. That’s normal. How is numbness in the jaw normal, I wonder? I don’t want to do the activity, so I fake a coughing fit and excuse myself to the hallway. When I return, I pretend I am dehydrated, drinking half a bottle of water. My colleague shakes his head at me from the podium, likely disappointed I am not participating. If I told him what happened, would he believe me?
The problems Skye is having are not limited to no one believes she is being followed by the Smile Entity. During dance practice for her tour, she moves her body in a way which triggers chronic pain in her back. Both her stomach and back bear scars from an excruciating car accident in which she was the sole survivor. I watch the scenes in which her scars show, clutching the areas on my body which are scarred or currently in pain. On a regular day, I fall somewhere on the middle part of the pain scale. On bad days, I try to avoid school. If I feel obligated, I will teach, but I’ll sit through the session. I try not to give too much information to my colleagues. They wouldn’t believe me, after all. Thus far in my life, barely anyone has. Take, for example, my Chair. We walked into work together today. He waited for me in the parking lot. We made small talk. Once inside, I lingered at the foot of the staircase. He asked what I was doing, and I explained I was feeling a bit of pain. Aw, he sing-songed. Poor baby. Instead of taking the elevator, I followed him up the stairs, made up lies about wearing the wrong shoes by accident, getting pain from thin soles. Wondered why I couldn’t tell him the truth. The thing about being disabled is able-bodied people will make up rules and restrictions for you if you’re visibly disabled. And they will make up stories in their head about you if you’re invisibly disabled.
I am tired of trying to prove my pain to other people. I have often thought about purchasing a cane, uncertain if I will need it. The times I walk through the halls with my hand against the wall to steady myself, I think about how foolish I’m being. I need relief. Instead, I fall into the pit of ableism, just like how I was raised by my family who don’t believe in medical treatment. My mother, who suffers from an eating disorder she nicknamed Patricia, explains to me I can “cure” my chronic illness by eating only leafy greens and nuts. What about seafood? I ask, remembering how my primary care doctor told me to eat a Mediterranean diet as it was good for my inflammation. That’s dangerous, my mother said. Do you even know what lives inside fish?
The Smile Entity already lives partially inside Skye. It feeds her hallucinations, dragging her body through PTSD-flashbacks of her car accident. In bed one evening, she imagines her friend is a car blaring its horn, bright headlights zoning into her eyes. In the hospital the next day, Skye awakens to find she’s on IV fluids. Her mother tells her she was found passed out with a concussion on her apartment floor. Skye tries to tell her mother what is happening, and her mother doesn’t believe her. I like to think even if I knew Skye, and lived in this world, I would have believed her. Even if I couldn’t see the monster following. Wouldn’t I?
*
Upon rewatching Smile 2, I begin to ponder how horror movies remind me a lot of rape culture. Before you tell me I’m making too much of an associative leap, I want you to think about how you are probably related to a rape survivor. You work with rape survivors. You may have experienced trauma in your life which you also discount. Society makes fun of survivors before it allows them to be killed by the system. Recently, Alabama put forth a law arguing for the jailing of women who miscarry. Under this law, women who are raped or abused will still be punished as “murderers” because, according to the law, they “should have left” their abusive circumstances. Even writing this essay feels reckless. I cannot imagine what journalists feel, center stage for these horrific events, laws, history. How difficult must it be to report without emotion attached to language. And can you trust your reader to imbue meaning into your language? Can you trust your reader to not twist your stories into sharp words to use against you in an argument? Can I trust the people in my life to hold my story gently.
*
Afternoon. A burst of sunshine pools on my desk. A colleague of mine sits in my office. We tell stories about last semester, during the 2024 election. Our students were having a hard time. The students in my class read James McBride’s Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and spent several class periods arguing about sexual violence and consent. The class were almost all in agreement: they thought women lied about their rape cases.
Well, of course, some of those cases are lies, my colleague says after I recount this story. There are probably tons of misreported cases. But that doesn’t erase the fact so many true cases.
Upon telling this to my therapist, she becomes enraged. Should I tell him more people make up break-ins than they do rapes? Tell him that next time you talk to him! She tells me the people I work with are behaving inappropriately. I am attempting, slowly, to respect myself and my boundaries. I realize she is right; some of them are more colleagues than friends.
After therapy, a student comes by my office for an essay extension. I have closed my door to process my session and am in the process of journaling when I hear their soft knock. We sit and talk about their semester is going. The student lets me know one of their family members is in the hospital, and is it okay to tell me more information? At first, I am hesitant. Hours earlier, my therapist told me my emotional boundaries were crossed when students got too close. I told my therapist it was difficult to find the words when a student was crying. How to tell them I couldn’t be their therapist felt a herculean task. Wasn’t I a student who cried in school? Didn’t I beg my professors for help?
I tell the student it’s okay to share, but I find myself holding back an emotional response. I nod, offering a few words of support before asking how I can help them. We have a brief conversation. They tell me stories about how their family member grew up poor and it is deeply affecting their health. The systems she lived in perpetuated violences and left her with mini-strokes and herniated disks. Her body is in constant pain. I think back to my own mother, whose eating disorder started because she couldn’t afford meals during childhood. I think about my own eating disorder, contemplate sharing this with the student, then don’t. Boundaries.
Sometimes I feel like my mother knows I also have jaw trauma. When I was younger, she used to jab her crimson nails in my face, grabbing my mouth when I was disobedient. I only have partial memories of this, reclaimed from months of EMDR therapy.
*
I have been thinking about the Smile Entity for weeks. Upon first learning about this movie, I was too afraid to watch, and spent hours on Tumblr, pouring over horrific images of the creature’s many stacked mouths and exposed flesh. I consumed fanart of the monster and the main character. When starting physical therapy for my pelvic floor, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about the monster. What’s it like having pelvic floor therapy? my partner asked one evening. I responded by showing him a gif of when the Smile Entity possesses a woman. He shuddered, visibly distraught. I don’t think I could go through the same experience.
For weeks, the entity becomes an obsession. I lay awake in bed, thinking about what it might be like to be possessed by a demon. In the bathroom at school, I noticed a young student smiling at me before ducking into a stall. The movie was making me paranoid, and I had never even watched the trailer. Now I’ve seen it, all I can think about is grief. The character’s grief over her car accident, her hallucinations of killing her mother, instances of trauma she endured throughout the film. It is impossible for me to look past her wealth. She is thin and white, with good teeth and expensive jewelry. Trauma loomed in the background, much the same way mine does. I feel it even when I’m not experiencing flashbacks. I’ve found lately whenever I have periods of calm, I am wondering in the back of my mind when I’ll get bad again. How soon until I return to weeks of despair, when I can barely speak to my colleagues and friends because I have climbed so deeply inside my psyche. How long until I am once again covered in my own blood.
Things are uprooting in my life. My relationship is falling apart, and my job keeps me up at night. I no longer feel as though I can trust students or colleagues. I worry our institution will be dismantled. I think often about the life I ran from, the things that happened to me, and the person I once was. I fear the past will come hurtling back. My mother encourages me to move in with her and to leave this state where they don’t believe in the rights of multiply marginalized people.
Is New England any better? Memories of peers calling me the f-slur come rushing back to my mind. Moving back home would also be an abandonment of myself. To admit I might return to the place where I almost took my life feels dangerous. Even visiting for holidays seems like a mistake. Each time, I must sleep in one of the two beds I was raped in. The house is navy-hued and half-encircled by forest. Down the street is conservation land; the same area where those boys took me outside and stole everything from me. It happened again and again over the past decade, but I find all I can think about is what they did. How they did it. Their hands and jaws and tongues and everything else.
*
I despise the Smile Entity remaining invisible to anyone not infected by him. It terrifies me that every character who dies by him is seen as having committed suicide. No one in the movie seems to question what kinds of circumstances led up to these deaths. No one questions the systems of oppression, how difficult it is to battle addiction, or how insidious post-traumatic stress disorder can be. As I write this, I can hear my colleagues’ voices in my head. Why write about horror movies like this if you’re just going to write memoir? How campy was this movie? It’s just a demon; it can’t hurt you. This isn’t a metaphor for PTSD.
I think about how this essay isn’t a metaphor but a story of my life and by proxy, my body’s reaction to what I deem to be a valid source of research (i.e., the film itself). I think about how oral storytelling is not as respected as alphabetic text. I think, above all, this essay could be a dream. This essay could be a puddle. A warm meal. The stove on a winter’s day. A hug. Forgiveness. Anything but what it is, which is a witness to trauma. Again, I am stuck staring. But I know if I don’t write through what happened to me, then these stories will take control of my life. They will yank open my jaw, possess me, and then some. There will be consequences. I do not want those consequences. I do not want possession. I do not want to be reminded of the hurt in my mouth.
As I write this, my partner has cracked his tooth. I have yet to ask him how. I don’t want to remind him of his pain. For the first time in five years, he has gone to the dentist. He will need more dental work. I am both afraid of what he will have to endure and afraid of his oncoming mood changes. When faced with aversity and stress, he often spills over, taking it out on me. Last night, when I first heard he had injured himself, I went to the gym. I apologized later, for not being there to take care of him. That’s totally fine, he said. There’s nothing wrong with working out on a Tuesday night. But there was something wrong. I am afraid of my partner, even though I still care about him. In the past two weeks, we have become distant from each other. I am dealing with a circumstance at work in which another student has filed a complaint against me. I have yet to see this complaint, but the student and I avoid each other. We walk down the hall and act like the other doesn’t exist. We are not ships in the night but snakes. I don’t want to be a snake. I want to be a dream, a wish, a hope, a feather, a pillow. Perhaps I would like to be a clock or a mouse or a piece of dryer lint. I would like to be healed.
I tell my therapist about the student. Then I tell her about how I spent the weekend working on a conference with my colleague, only to endure him telling everyone I only did “some” of the labor. This same colleague calls himself my friend. He also calls me loud. Other things he has called me are a parrot, a bird, a hyena, an owl, and other animals I cannot immediately recall. His purpose in doing so is telling me I am too much. I take up space when I shouldn’t. He once told me my trauma was a flood and why could I not be a river instead. He told me I was annoying. I responded by telling him I loved him.
fawn
/fôn/
noun
1. A girl alone in a field with a threat.
2. The way I contort my body and mind at all hours of the day.
*
At first, Skye doesn’t believe there is a monster pursuing her. After witnessing her friend taking his life, Skye begins receiving cryptic text messages from a man who claims he has been tracking the Smile Entity for months, concluding the only way to stop the monster is to kill its host.
When my therapist first told me what I experienced in high school was rape, I didn’t believe her. Since first having taught this information about me, to me, years ago, I have switched therapists three times. My current therapist doesn’t need more than a brief amount of information before telling me she believes me. After I detail one short story about abusive things my ex said to me, she puts her hand up to halt me.
That’s abuse. you realize that, right? That’s toxic.
I don’t know how to react, so I start crying.
In our EMDR sessions, my mother appears as a literal monster. Sometimes she is a soundbite, electric yellow and leaping across the room. Other times she appears with long hair spilling over the floor, her face obscured. She is sobbing in the corner of my father’s kitchen. She has too many teeth. There is something wrong with her body. Every ten seconds, my therapist pauses me to ask what I am seeing and feeling. My mother is here again, and she is a monster, I try to explain.
Okay, stay with that. My therapist starts the EMDR buzzers again and I close my eyes. In earlier versions of this essay, I wrote that my therapist closed my eyes for me. Even though this didn’t happen, it strikes me as odd. Even in reflection, I am not in control of my own body. I remember and misremember and remember like tangled wires, body sparking and snapping at the wrong times.
Sometimes, I do not believe my mother is a monster. I have so much misplaced compassion for her, I do not know how to hold her accountable for what she put me through. So much fear over others who have hurt me.
When one of my high school exes approached me while in AA, I immediately forgave him.
Are you sure? He is a year older, still wearing faded Vans and jeans with holes. His eyes are arctic blue.
Of course. You didn’t mean it, right?
There is only consumption in the world of the Smile Entity; it lives for blood.
*
In some versions of EMDR, I am a child holding my current self’s hand. My child-self is six. She is always angry.
Have we stopped hurting ourselves yet? she asks one session.
Not yet, but we’re working on it. I am crying in the daydream before realizing I’m crying in therapy. My therapist congratulates me on a job well done.
If I could go back in time, I would gently guide my nineteen-year-old self away from my ex. I would sit her in the warmth of my kitchen, make her a mug of tea, and hold her hands while explaining everything. I would tell her things are not her fault. And I would urge her to leave. Run, quickly from the cold place. From the house that will continue to eat you alive if you stay. I like to think I wouldn’t push my future self away. I hope I would reckless and confident and above all else, brave enough, to believe myself.
Sam Moe (she/they) is the author of eight books. Her most recent poetry collection, RED HALCYON, is forthcoming from Querencia Press in 2026. Her debut short story collection, I MIGHT TRUST YOU, is out from Experiments in Fiction (2025). She has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and received fellowships from the Longleaf Writer’s conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Sam has also attended residencies at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, VCCA, and Château d’Orquevau.
