The Online Profile of a Serial Killer

Posted on *date blocked* (Fourth Post)

It's daytime, and the footsteps and chatter in the hallway keeps me awake. The haze of the overdose is gone, my mind clear. My iPhone charges on the chair by the wall. Stepping out of the washroom, I see a woman wearing a white coat waiting by the foot of my bed. I reach around my back to tie my gown tighter.

"I'm from the Mental Health Unit," she says, flashing a toothy smile. She holds a clipboard over her chest. I slink into bed, making sure none of my gown opens up in the wrong places.

"Here it comes," I say in a condescending tone.

"I have some questions if you don't mind," her voice dripping with empathy.

"I already have a therapist," I press a button and my bed inclines to an upright position.

"Is your doctor helping your mood?"

"He's great, can't you tell?" I smirk. "I don't need another one of you guys, no offence."

She sighs and thinks. "You're welcome to stay here a few more days. It might be best."

"I'll pass on that," I say.

She writes something on her clip board.

"What are you writing?"

"I want to give you my card," she reaches into her pocket.

"No thank you."

"If you need to talk to anyone, you can call me," she extends her arm to me, offering her card.

"I won't need to," I refuse to take it. "There's nothing to talk about. I know what I need to do." 

Marie holds open the plastic grocery bag open as I dump my dirty clothes inside. I inhale the clean laundry smell of the fresh clothes I'm wearing, that Marie brought me from home, and I'm glad to be checking out of the hospital. I say goodbye to the nurses and walk out of St. Michael's into the busy streets of downtown, Toronto.

I don't feel like going home. It's morning and autumn is alive. The air is cool, the hoodies and sweaters are out, and the university kids are walking around with their backpacks. Marie and I walk south down Yonge Street, the smell of Lake Ontario creeping closer. Reaching the harbor, the lake smell is overpowered by the fragrance of burning charcoal and smoking meats from the vendors at the Spicy Food Festival. We tread down the boardwalk, reaching the end, and then continue down Lakeshore Boulevard to a small grassy park along the arm of a peninsula. Strolling down the paved path, our faces are dampened by the mist from waves smashing against white boulders lining the shore.

"He was so real to me," I say.

"The mind is a powerful thing," says Marie.

"And the emails? How..."

"You... you wrote them sedated on meds."

"But Will's page? The page started way before the meds? I don't remember any of it."

"My psychiatrist thinks the anxiety I suffered from was caused by a repressed memory," says Marie. "He says it's a common thing to forget what your mind doesn't want to remember. He... he thinks I was molested in my childhood. I told him I wasn't, and he just said I was repressing the memory and prescribed more... more pills. The mind is a powerful thing...."

Childhood, Marie tells me. I repeat the words in my head -- childhood -- repressed memories.

Suddenly, I think of my parents. I think of the cottage and the forest, and I recall the dreams that have haunted me since starting the meds. The visions of the dead birch and the portrait of Jesus hit me like the waves on the boulders beside us. There was a quickening in my blood – much like, I would imagine, a rise in temperature when a life-long sailor feels that he is getting closer to the sea.