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almighty-god-saved-me-blog · 6 years ago

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What Allows Me to Regain a Happy Life? | Eastern Lightning

Xiaoping

This is an age when people care very much about physical attractiveness and a good looking body. With a beautiful face and a slim figure, I turned heads no matter what kind of clothes I wore. People around me often praised me and envied that I had both a great figure and a great face, and my husband was also very kind to me. Because of this, I was especially confident. No matter where I went, I walked with my head held high and my back straight. I displayed myself to receive praise from others. In my heart I believed: As long as a woman has a graceful figure and a pretty face, she could rewrite her own life.

However, unexpectedly, after having a child, I began to put on weight. Gradually, my husband began to dislike me, and he said I had a chubby stomach and fat legs. Some people also joked sarcastically at me, saying that I even put on weight when I drank water, and that I was so fat that I was out of shape. Listening to these words, I felt especially awful. My face burned as if I was slapped. When I had used to go out, people praised my beauty, but now they all ridiculed me. It was as if I fell from heaven to hell. The drastic contrast seriously damaged my pride, and I felt so painful inside. One time, I went shopping with my husband, and I was buying trousers for him in a department store. Two shop assistants quietly whispered behind me, “This guy is so young and handsome. How is he with this big fat woman?” When I heard their critiques, I was so angry that I threw the pants onto the counter, and then turned and left. I couldn’t stop my tears from flowing. I thought: These days, people only value a good face and a nice figure. If a woman doesn’t have a beautiful face and a slim figure, then there’s no way for her to stand in society. So, I made up my mind: When I stop breastfeeding my child, I’ll try to lose weight. I’ll make those people who laughed at me envious and jealous! Later, a friend of mine said to me, “Look at how chubby you’ve become. So many men have a young mistress these days. If you keep getting fatter and don’t try to lose weight, what will you do if one day your husband becomes unfaithful and finds a mistress?” When I heard things like this, I became more miserable inside, and I felt a strong sense of danger. I thought: When my figure hadn’t changed, my husband obeyed everything I said. After I put on weight, my husband started to dislike me. If things go according to what my friend said, this would be awful. I can’t allow something like this to happen. I felt very anxious. In those days, even in my dreams I dreamed that my husband ran off with some other woman. This made me feel even more that losing weight is of utmost importance. After my child was weaned, I looked for effective short-term ways of losing weight through acquaintances and the Internet. I even consulted experts in weight loss, who said to me, “If you want a slim figure, you have to pay the price. A married woman like you especially needs to look after her weight. You’re still young. It’s too late if you want to lose weight when you’re older. Your figure is your confidence. Only when your figure is better can you grasp your husband’s heart.” The expert was right! Only when a woman has a perfect figure can she have total confidence and restore her image in others’ minds. So, I started to implement my own weight loss plans without hesitation, looking for “secret recipes” for losing weight.

One time, my younger sister said to me that her neighbor took some diet pills and lost around 15 kg in one month. I was really excited after hearing it, and I got my sister to look into it and buy a few boxes for me. My sister said, “Sis, every medicine has its side effect. It will surely do some impact to your body. You have to be careful.” When I heard this, I was a bit worried. I was afraid that maybe it really had some side effects that would damage my body. But then I thought: When my figure was good, my husband and people around me all praised me and were envious. However, after my figure became bad, all that I have encountered is sarcasm, jokes, and humiliation. There’s so much difference between the two. I’ll just throw caution to the winds. I don’t care about whether taking this medicine is dangerous to my body. As long as it could make me slimmer, nothing else is important. So, I started taking weight loss pills. Normally, I should have taken one pill a day, but I increased the dosage to achieve a faster result. Because of the stimulus from the pills, I could only sleep about two to three hours a night. My head felt bloated, my eyes hurt, and my heart began palpitating. I also stopped having proper meals every day, but only ate various fruits and vegetables which can lower fat like cucumbers, tomatoes, and watermelons. I only had some plain noodles twice a month. Since I lacked both nutrition and sleep, I became a bit dazed. But so that I could regain my original slim body after the diet, I felt that this wasn’t much pain to suffer through. Determination would lead to success. After some time, every day, I would try on a nice dress that my friend had given me. In the beginning, I could only pull it over my head, but after a month, I could finally put it on easily. I happily stood in the courtyard admiring myself, but suddenly I saw blackness and collapsed. Seeing this, my husband angrily said to me, “You’re really throwing away your life to be beautiful!” But I ignored his words. No matter what, I slimmed down now. I didn’t suffer in vain this past month. Later, I purposefully wore pretty dresses and went out into the streets. I wanted to let those people who had used to joke about my weight see my slim figure. When my neighbors saw me, sure enough, they were surprised, “Wow! How did you slim down so quickly? Your weight loss is really successful!” Once again, they gazed at me with envy and jealousy. At that time, my husband didn’t say sarcastic things as he did before, and his attitude toward me improved. He even smiled at me and said, “You really do look better when you’re thin!” Listening to these words, my vanity was satisfied once again. My desire to lose weight became even stronger. I got addicted as if I was on drugs, and I couldn’t even have stopped if I wanted to. I still thought that my figure wasn’t perfect enough, so I bought another box of weight loss pills. But I could never have thought that when I slimmed down to the figure I wanted, suffering would follow on.

One morning, when I woke up I found that there were many small red spots on my body, even on my scalp and in my ears. I immediately had my mother accompany me to the hospital for an examination. The doctor said I had psoriasis, a refractory skin disease. It couldn’t be totally cured, but could only be controlled as much as possible through medicine. The reason was because my immunity was lowered and I had no resistance, so that the toxin in my body was unable to be purged and remain in my bloodstream. I had never imagined that, while pursuing a slim figure, I would catch a skin disease that caused anyone who saw me to distance themselves. This price is too high. Later, I had very itchy reddish patches from head to toe. My husband despised me and kept his distance too. Additionally, I didn’t dare to go out and was afraid of being laughed at. I felt exceedingly painful inside, and cried every day. I had tried to lose weight to show off my body, but now, not only could I not show off, but I brought trouble upon myself. Other people could wear short tops and pants, but I had to wrap myself up tightly to hide the patches I had all over my body. I was so regretful, but things being what they were, there was no way to turn back. I could only look everywhere for doctors to cure my skin problems. However, all medicine could only control it for a time, but not cure the cause. What made me even more pained was that weight loss drug induces dependency—since I stopped taking weight loss pills because of my sickness, I quickly got fat again. The ridicule from people and cold-shoulder and dislike from my family made me feel very distressed, and I even had suicidal thoughts. I had always pursued a perfect figure and always wanted to change my own fate through losing weight, but, not only did I not lose weight, I even caught this disease and brought myself great damages. In particular, I saw that some people around me got insomnia, heart diseases or anorexia for losing weight, and some even got stomach cancer and paid for beauty with their lives. All this made me feel lost: What did I do this for? Is it just so that people would praise me? Is it really worth it to damage my body to this extent?

Later, I had the fortune to accept Almighty God’s work of the last days. In a gathering, I fellowshiped about my process of losing weight to the sisters, and one of them read me a passage of Almighty God��s words: “Your temperament, caliber, appearance, stature, family in which you were born, your job and your marriage, the entirety of you, even the color of your hair and your skin, and the time of your birth were all arranged by My hands. Even the things you do and the people you meet every single day are arranged by My hands, not to mention the fact that bringing you into My presence today is actually My arrangement. Do not throw yourself into disorder; you should proceed calmly” (The Word Appears in the Flesh). The sister fellowshiped, “Everything is predestined by God, including the kind of marriage and family we have, what appearance and skin color we have, when we are fat, and when we are thin. It is not something that anyone or anything could change. What God gives us is all the best, it is all meaningful, but we are not able to obey God’s sovereignty and predestination, and we always feel that everything God bestows is not to our will. We always want to pursue perfectness and oppose God’s sovereignty and change all that God has given us. That is why we have self-harmed and brought ourselves so much pain. Look at such and such in my working unit. In pursuit of beauty, she messed up her nerves when undergoing a lip line surgery and now she has a crooked mouth. Some other people, in order to lose weight, went to have liposuction and died on the spot. The reason these people have encountered such disasters is because they do not understand God’s authority and sovereignty. This is the bitter consequence of their vain attempt to change their fate by themselves.”

Through God’s words and the sister’s fellowship, I knew that the kind of marriage, family, appearance, and figure I have are all in God’s hand. God has already arranged it. It is not something that I can change when I want to. However, because I had no understanding of God’s sovereignty, I tried to change my own fate through losing weight. As a result, I spent a lot of money and suffered a lot of hardships, but in the end, not only did I not change my fate, I caught an obstinate skin disease and suffered from it every day…. I am truly too foolish and ignorant! Later, I partook in church life with brothers and sisters, singing hymns in praise of God, fellowshiping about God’s words, and sharing our own respective experiences and witnesses. In my association with them, I saw that those brothers and sisters dress very plainly. They do not pursue physical attractiveness or a good figure. They accept and submit to whatever God has given to them, and they live relaxed and carefree. They help and support each other and treat everyone fairly. They do not deal with somebody differently because of differences in their appearance and figure. This gave me consolation and release. I also realized that I could no longer rely on weight loss to change my own fate. The whole life of every person is in God’s hands, and I must submit to God’s sovereignty and arrangement.

Later, I saw these words of God: “It is like someone saying to you: ‘Your face is shaped wonderfully. Just a little short along the bridge of the nose, but if you have that fixed, you will be a world-class beauty!’ For someone who has never wanted to have cosmetic surgery, would their heart be moved hearing these words? (Yes.) So are these words seductive? Is this seduction tempting to you? Is it testing? (Yes.) Does God say things like this? (No.) Was there any hint of this in God’s words that we looked at just now? (No.) Why? Does God say what He thinks in His heart? Can man see God’s heart through His words? (Yes.) But when the serpent had spoken those words to the woman, were you able to see its heart? (No.) And because of man’s ignorance, they were easily seduced by the serpent’s words, they were easily hooked, easily led. So were you able to see Satan’s intentions? Were you able to see the purpose behind what it said? Were you able to see its plot and its cunning scheme? (No.) What kind of disposition is represented by Satan’s way of speaking? What kind of essence have you seen in Satan through these words? (Evil.) Evil. Is it insidious? Perhaps on the surface it smiles at you or reveals no expression whatsoever. But in its heart it is calculating how to reach its objective, and it is this objective that you are unable to see. You are then seduced by all the promises it gives you, all the advantages it talks about. You see them as good, and you feel that what it says is more useful, more substantial than what God says. When this happens, does man not then become a submissive prisoner? (Yes.) So is this means used by Satan not diabolical? You allow yourself to sink low. Without moving a finger, with these two sentences you are happy to follow along with it, to comply with it. Its objective has been reached. Is this not so? (Yes.) Is this intention not sinister? Is this not Satan’s most primal countenance? (Yes.) From Satan’s words, man can see its sinister motives, see its hideous countenance and see its essence” (“God Himself, the Unique IV” in Continuation of The Word Appears in the Flesh). The revelations in God’s words allowed me to see that the pursuit of a fine physical figure is Satan’s trick. Satan uses some lies and fallacies to deceive me. On the outside, they sound very reasonable and kind, as if it’s for my own good, so that I am unknowingly deceived and controlled by them. For example, “A graceful lady is a gentleman’s desire,” “A woman’s asset is her figure and face,” and “As long as you have a good figure, you’ll get the praise of people around you and the love of your husband, and your life will be more exciting.” All the time, I was fooled by these satanic lies and they led me by the nose. I thought wholeheartedly that only by having a fine figure would I be able to grasp my husband’s heart, and receive the praise and esteem of others. In order to satisfy my vanity, to reach the goals of my own desire, I didn’t even hesitate to use drugs to damage my own body. But in the end, what it brought me were only the torment of sickness and pain that I cannot shake away. Only then did I realize that when people follow the trends of the world and live for the flesh, they are suffering from Satan’s trampling and affliction. At the same time, I also recognized that only God’s word can allow people to understand the truth, see through Satan’s tricks, and rescue people from Satan’s deception and harm. Slowly, I turned away from Satan’s lies and didn’t rely on those weight loss pills and food. I no longer cared about other people’s gazes and their critiques about me, nor did I care about how my husband treated me. Instead, I believed in the destiny God has for me, and I lived by God’s words. I ate regularly every day and normally read God’s word, pursued the truth, and performed my duty as a creature of God. Unwittingly, I recovered, and there were few patches on my body. Thank God! I know that this is all God’s love for me. It is God that has brought me before Him, bestowed the truth upon me, and given me discernment, so that I am no longer tricked by Satan and am able to live under God’s care and protection. My spirit is released and set free, I have a proper goal in life to pursue, and no longer live in so much pain.

Reviewing the process of my losing weight, it was truly full of difficulties and danger. I almost ended up losing my life. If it wasn’t for God’s care and protection and His salvation, I would still be trapped in this evil current, stubbornly seeking after a perfect figure and being afflicted and trampled by Satan…. It was God’s words that allowed me to understand that all of this was caused by Satan, which used my vanity to confuse, seduce, and cheat me, so that I sank low and was trapped in its snare and unable to escape. Thanks to God’s words that awakened me, I was no longer bothered by my figure, nor did I care how others judged me. Instead, I only pursued the truth, lived by God’s word, and submitted to God’s sovereignty and arrangements, so as to live out the true likeness of man that God demands and receive God’s approval. I felt that living like this was very happy and fulfilling. After a period of time, as my husband saw that my illness was getting better, that my mental outlook was improving, that my attitude toward life became positive and optimistic, and that all the brothers and sisters in the church were good honest people, he didn’t cold-shoulder me for my weight anymore and was nicer to me. I thank God from the bottom of my heart that His words have brought an upturn in my life. Now, my life is full of happiness. I am extremely released and free when living church life and performing my duties with my brothers and sisters. I realize that only by giving myself into God’s hand and submitting to God’s sovereignty and arrangement can I gain the greatest happiness and live the most beautiful life!

Source: What Allows Me to Regain a Happy Life?

#the truth #the last days #the church #salvation

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roman-catholic-mass-readings · 7 years ago

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13th Oct >> Mass Readings (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada) for

Friday of the Twenty-Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Saint Edward the Confessor, King (England).

Friday of the Twenty-Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

(Liturgical Colour: Green) First Reading Joel 1:13-15,2:1-2 Priests, put on sackcloth and lament. Ministers of the altar, wail. Come, pass the night in sackcloth, you ministers of my God. For the house of our God has been deprived of oblation and libation. Order a fast, proclaim a solemn assembly; elders, call together all the inhabitants of the country to the house of the Lord your God. Cry out to the Lord, ‘Oh, what a day! For the day of the Lord is near, it comes as a devastation from Shaddai.’ Sound the trumpet in Zion, give the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the country tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, yes, it is near. Day of darkness and gloom, day of cloud and blackness. Like the dawn there spreads across the mountains a vast and mighty host, such as has never been before, such as will never be again to the remotest ages. The Word of the Lord R/ Thanks be to God. Responsorial Psalm Psalm 9A(9):2-3,6,16,8-9 R/ The Lord will judge the world with justice. I will praise you, Lord, with all my heart; I will recount all your wonders. I will rejoice in you and be glad, and sing psalms to your name, O Most High. R/ The Lord will judge the world with justice. You have checked the nations, destroyed the wicked; you have wiped out their name for ever and ever. The nations have fallen in the pit which they made, their feet caught in the snare they laid. R/ The Lord will judge the world with justice. But the Lord sits enthroned for ever. He has set up his throne for judgement; he will judge the world with justice, he will judge the peoples with his truth. R/ The Lord will judge the world with justice. Gospel Acclamation John 10:27 Alleluia, alleluia! The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice, says the Lord, I know them and they follow me. Alleluia! Or John 12:31-32 Alleluia, alleluia! Now the prince of this world is to be overthrown, says the Lord. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men to myself. Alleluia! Gospel Luke 11:15-26 When Jesus had cast out a devil, some of the people said, ‘It is through Beelzebul, the prince of devils, that he casts out devils.’ Others asked him, as a test, for a sign from heaven; but, knowing what they were thinking, he said to them, ‘Every kingdom divided against itself is heading for ruin, and a household divided against itself collapses. So too with Satan: if he is divided against himself, how can his kingdom stand? – since you assert that it is through Beelzebul that I cast out devils. Now if it is through Beelzebul that I cast out devils, through whom do your own experts cast them out? Let them be your judges then. But if it is through the finger of God that I cast out devils, then know that the kingdom of God has overtaken you. So long as a strong man fully armed guards his own palace, his goods are undisturbed; but when someone stronger than he is attacks and defeats him, the stronger man takes away all the weapons he relied on and shares out his spoil. ‘He who is not with me is against me; and he who does not gather with me scatters. ‘When an unclean spirit goes out of a man it wanders through waterless country looking for a place to rest, and not finding one it says, “I will go back to the home I came from.” But on arrival, finding it swept and tidied, it then goes off and brings seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and set up house there, so that the man ends up by being worse than he was before.’ The Gospel of the Lord R/ Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ. — — —

Saint Edward the Confessor, King (England)

(Liturgical Colour: White) First Reading Romans 8:26-30 The Spirit comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God. We know that by turning everything to their good God co-operates with all those who love him, with all those that he has called according to his purpose. They are the ones he chose specially long ago and intended to become true images of his Son, so that his Son might be the eldest of many brothers. He called those he intended for this; those he called he justified, and with those he justified he shared his glory. The Word of the Lord R/ Thanks be to God. Responsorial Psalm Psalm 130(131) R/ Keep my soul in peace before you, O Lord. O Lord, my heart is not proud nor haughty my eyes. I have not gone after things too great nor marvels beyond me. R/ Keep my soul in peace before you, O Lord. Truly I have set my soul in silence and peace. A weaned child on its mother’s breast, even so is my soul. R/ Keep my soul in peace before you, O Lord. O Israel, hope in the Lord both now and forever. R/ Keep my soul in peace before you, O Lord. Gospel Acclamation Matthew 5:3 Alleluia, alleluia! How happy are the poor in spirit: theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Alleluia! Gospel Matthew 5:1-12a How happy are the poor in spirit Seeing the crowds, Jesus went up the hill. There he sat down and was joined by his disciples. Then he began to speak. This is what he taught them: ‘How happy are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Happy the gentle: they shall have the earth for their heritage. Happy those who mourn: they shall be comforted. Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right: they shall be satisfied. Happy the merciful: they shall have mercy shown them. Happy the pure in heart: they shall see God. Happy the peacemakers: they shall be called sons of God. Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right: theirs is the kingdom of heaven. ‘Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.’ The Gospel of the Lord R/ Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ.

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almightygodismydependence-blog · 6 years ago

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What Allows Me to Regain a Happy Life?

Xiaoping

Later, I had the fortune to accept Almighty God’s work of the last days. In a gathering, I fellowshiped about my process of losing weight to the sisters, and one of them read me a passage of Almighty God’s words: “Your temperament, caliber, appearance, stature, family in which you were born, your job and your marriage, the entirety of you, even the color of your hair and your skin, and the time of your birth were all arranged by My hands. Even the things you do and the people you meet every single day are arranged by My hands, not to mention the fact that bringing you into My presence today is actually My arrangement. Do not throw yourself into disorder; you should proceed calmly” (The Word Appears in the Flesh). The sister fellowshiped, “Everything is predestined by God, including the kind of marriage and family we have, what appearance and skin color we have, when we are fat, and when we are thin. It is not something that anyone or anything could change. What God gives us is all the best, it is all meaningful, but we are not able to obey God’s sovereignty and predestination, and we always feel that everything God bestows is not to our will. We always want to pursue perfectness and oppose God’s sovereignty and change all that God has given us. That is why we have self-harmed and brought ourselves so much pain. Look at such and such in my working unit. In pursuit of beauty, she messed up her nerves when undergoing a lip line surgery and now she has a crooked mouth. Some other people, in order to lose weight, went to have liposuction and died on the spot. The reason these people have encountered such disasters is because they do not understand God’s authority and sovereignty. This is the bitter consequence of their vain attempt to change their fate by themselves.”

#Almighty God #God's work #salvation #praise

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jackfollmanwriter-blog · 6 years ago

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Good Night’s Sleep

Part I

Unfortunately sleep apnea runs in my family. I remember family vacations where I considered cashing in all of my allowance money so I could get my own hotel room and not have to listen to the epic snoring battle that was taking place between my parents in the queen bed next to me.

I had made it 29 years in life without ever being accused of snoring by any former roommates, boyfriends or family. However, a few months of regularly waking up feeling like I was out of breath with my heart racing along with a healthy dose websites discussing sleep apnea finally convinced me the family curse had descended upon me. I went to the doctor with visions of scaring away every potential future mate by wearing a sleep apnea mask that made me look like some kind of H.R. Giger nightmare.

I wasn’t diagnosed with sleep apnea yet though. My HMO-financed physician who had an office above a dry cleaner in a part of town that had never even heard of the word “gentrification” told me that the best and cheapest way to figure out if I had sleep apnea or not would be to record myself sleeping each night for a few weeks and he could review the tapes and decide.

I thoroughly questioned this method but my doctor explained to me the other option of coming into a facility to do extensive testing would cost upwards of $2,000, even with my wonderful insurance. It would also require me sleeping in a doctor’s office from time to time. He assured me videotaping myself would be the easiest and cheapest way and one of his nurses assured me she did the same exact thing and it worked well.

I couldn’t help but laugh that night when I set up my camera and tripod aimed at my bed like I was going to shoot some kind of low budget porn, but I figured it was worth it to find out if I had an ailment that would shave years off of my life and to save some serious money. The biggest actual downside of the thing to me was wearing pajamas for the first time since I was a preteen. I had grown accustomed to sleeping in my birthday suit to aide in keeping myself cool in the fight against the warm Southern California nights.

*****

The three weeks of filming went by quickly. I was putting in long days at work and pretty much just coming home and crashing each night. The only time the filming actually really affected me was one Saturday when I came home drunk, hit record and then passed out fully clothed on top of the covers. I considered deleting my drunken moment but figured it might actually be good to have a comparison to see how getting drunk affected my potential sleep apnea. I left it on there when I turned in my recordings to my doctor.

It took about a month before I was summoned back to my doctor’s office to go over the results.

Things started out well initially. My doctor told me he didn’t think I had sleep apnea and that I had saved thousands of dollars and countless hours of facility testing, but things took a sharp turn to the horrifying.

I still remember my doctor casually saying the phrase that completely changed my life.

“The only time I really ever noticed even tiny disturbances in your sleep pattern was when your boyfriend would come in and out of the bed.”

“Huh?” I fired back. “Maybe you have the wrong video. I don’t have a boyfriend.”

Once the doctor popped in the flash drive and showed me collapse into my bed I knew he had been watching the right video. I saw myself lying alone in my bed, but after about a minute of watching me sleep in fast forward my body went limp when I saw what he was talking about.

An hour into the first night of my recorded slumber a male figure appeared in the field of vision of the camera. Tall, gaunt, dressed in black with a head of long black hair that obscured his face, I couldn’t get a real read on exactly how the man looked, but he appeared to be white and probably in his 20s or 30s. I felt vomit bubble up to the back of my throat when I watched him stealthily slide on top of the covers on the side of my king size bed I didn’t sleep on, fold his arms across his chest and just lie there, staring up at the ceiling.

“What the fuck?” I said and literally recoiled into my plastic chair. How did I never wake up?”

“Well, I have to say you are the deepest sleeper I have ever reviewed,” my doctor assured me just before I vomited all over myself.

I cleaned myself up and watched all of the nights I recorded myself in the doctor’s office before heading to the police station. Each night followed the same routine: I would go to sleep and an hour or so later, the man, who never gave a good look at his face, entered, laid down next to me and then left just before sunrise. The man never did anything sinister, never anything sexual, never even touched me and for some reason it made the whole thing that much worse to me personally.

The cops were little to no help. Weaned on a steady diet of cop shows, I expected to be helped out by a dangerously-attractive male/female duo of detectives in their late-20s/early-30s who regularly peppered their conversation with flirtations at each other, but was far from what I got. I got one middle-aged guy with ears caked with flaky psoriasis who all but admitted he didn’t give a shit about my case. He directly mentioned that any case without violence took a backseat in a district that was home to gangs of five different ethnicities.

Every night after this day has pretty much been outright hell. I didn’t even go back to my apartment. I had my dad and brother go in there and get my important shit and moved into my old room at my parents’ house 15 miles away from my old apartment.

Despite my parents’ high-tech security system, heavy locks on my old bedroom door and windows, the presence of my former USC linebacker dad in the house and the family German Sheppard that was now sleeping outside my door, I would be lucky if I could muster a few hours of restless sleep each night. Everything in my life suffered. I could hardly focus at work I was so tired, my already-struggling social life became non-existent and I had zero trust for any male I met, so forget about dating.

Things were so bad I eventually decided the best idea would be to just move. Work was happy to offer me a position in their Atlanta headquarters to try and rejuvenate my life capabilities. So, after six months of persisting torture, I packed up my stuff and headed across the country to move in with my cousin Felicia who was hell bent on turning my life around.

Things got better in Atlanta. The anonymity it brought to my life and the distance it gave me from the incident slowly brought me back to life.

The cops in LA had done pretty much nothing on the case, but they did find out one piece of evidence they shared with my dad and I. It appeared my sleeping partner had been entering my apartment by simply picking my door handle lock with a credit card. This was a tactic I regrettably had done myself before when I was locked out and never really thought about how vulnerable it revealed the security of my apartment was.

My dad had actually had been doing more work on the case than the cops probably were but, he didn’t tell me much about it until I had reluctantly come home for Thanksgiving. My nerves had been soothed by the gin and tonics the two of us had been swigging after our holiday gorging and I had opened up to discussing the painful incident.

“There were actually security cameras outside of your door in the hallway of your building,” my dad said after a long discussion about whether I was comfortable with even talking about the whole thing.

“Now that you mention it, I do remember that,” I said.

“Yeah, the fucking cops didn’t even look at it as far as I could tell,” my dad groused. “But I looked into it. According to you building’s manager, they hadn’t worked in a couple of years, but they just left them there broken. They got the security company to turn in the old tapes to the cops, but there was nothing showing the guy coming to your apartment in the night. But I had been wondering… you said you had gotten into your apartment before by picking the lock with a credit card, did you ever tell anyone about that?”

“As far as I can remember, no, and if I did it would have been a close friend. It was literally like five years ago I did that though.”

Judging by how furiously my dad started sucking down his drink, I could tell he was on to something.

He killed all of the liquid in the glass and spoke up.

“If it was five years ago, those security cameras still worked. They would have seen you do it.”

We both sat there silently for a few moments, soaking in the revelation – my dad started chewing on his gin-washed ice, I finished the last of my drink.

“They also would have known that the cameras didn’t actually work the past couple of years,” I chimed in.

We sat there silently for a few more moments before I asked another question.

“What was the name of the security company?”

*****

Alta Rose Security’s office was tucked into the middle of the endless sun-bleached field of warehouses and factories that was City of Industry, California. The hideous white stucco building the company took residence in looked possibly abandoned when my dad and I walked up to the heavily-barred front door.

My dad dialed up the listed extension for Alta Rose on a filthy little call box next to the door. Without a word from the other end, the box made a muffled noise and the black-barred door gave a hearty buzz.

We entered a dark, stuffy little hallway that smelled like a mix of chlorine and the ghosts of cigarettes led us to a thick mahogany door for Alta Rose.

I followed my dad inside the office.

The inside of the office looked like an episode of hoarders. Dusty cardboard boxes were stacked all around the lobby like a game of office Jenga, the floor was littered with loose folders and random papers and decrepit-looking office equipment. I watched my dad almost fall on his ass after tripping over a three-hole puncher.

“Hello,” my dad called out in a thoroughly-annoyed tone.

It took a while, but eventually a voice responded behind a dead computer monitor that looked like it was from 1997.

“Yes, come in.”

My dad and I followed the voice up to a front counter and an elderly woman wearing heavy red eye shadow, rouge and bright red lipstick which made her look a bit like a clown stood up with her big hoop earrings jangling.

She peered at us from behind gold glasses and smacked her lips.

“Not sure if you have the right office. We are out of business as of two weeks ago.”

“Oh no, no, no problem,” my dad replied. “We were actually just looking to ask some questions.”

My dad’s words sounded distant in my ears. I was distracted by something I saw on the wall next to the woman – a framed portrait plaque. The plaque featured a younger man of about 30 with long black hair, a gaunt white face with sunken eyes and an unsmiling mouth. There was no denying it. It was my sleeping partner from the videos. I noticed an inscription upon gold below the picture – EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH SCOTT LYNN.

“Uh, uh, uh ma’am,” I could barely get the words out. “Where is he?”

I pointed to the plaque of Scott Lynn with a wobbling hand and the woman squinted up at the thing.

My heart dropped when she spoke.

“That’s Scott. Worked here for years, but he left a few months ago and moved to Atlanta, but I don’t know why.”

Part II

My dad gulped. I could tell he was going to say something he really didn’t want to say.

“I haven’t been completely honest with you. There’s something I need to show you.”

The video my dad pulled up on his laptop couldn’t have looked more innocent at first. I was watched a trio of pre-teen boys I vaguely recognized from the neighborhood throw down slam dunks into a water basketball hoop in a sun-drenched suburban backyard.

“Russell Miller from down the street’s dad gave me this video a few months ago.”

I was about to ask my dad why I would care about Russell Miller and his little buddies holding a pool slam dunk contest, but was interrupted by the bright scene getting interrupted by a close-up of Russell breathing hard in the dark of night.

Russell started to talk in between labored breaths.

“We’re eggin every house up and down this block. No one is safe I swear, not even that big ass guy down the block with the scary ass German Sheppard.”

The video cut to a darkened shot of the front of my parents’ house slightly obscured by some bushes that were right next to the camera. The sound of young boys panting heavily served as the soundtrack until Russell stepped into the shot with an egg in his hand and snickering filled the air.

Russell cocked back his arm to launch and I watched the first couple of eggs splatter just above my childhood bedroom window. He grabbed a couple more eggs out of the pocket of his hoodie and cocked back to launch them.

He stopped.

“What the fuck?” Russell whispered and ducked back down behind the camera.

“What happened? What happened?” The cameraman asked.

“There’s someone out there,” Russell whispered with his eyes glued to my parents’ house.

The camera panned through the brush and focused in on my parents’ white house that was shining in the pale street light. It took a second for the shot to focus, but my breath disappeared once it did. Standing off to the side of my parents’ house, crouching down next to small shrubs was the unmistakable to me darkened silhouette of a man.

“What the hell is he doing?” The voice of the cameraman whispered.

Just as the cameraman finished talking, Joel’s gaze turned towards the bushes where the boys were hiding.

“Holy shit. Holy shit.” The boys’ voices cried out over the final frames of the video.

I looked to my dad with tears in my eyes. He looked like a dog that had just been scolded for going through the trash.

“How did you not tell me this?” I asked with a shuddering jaw.

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to make you feel even worse.”

“What the fuck dad?”

“And there’s something else I found out I haven’t told you about yet. I found out our home security company was owned by the same company Scott Lynn worked for. It just had a different name. I didn’t know, but it might mean he could…

“Tweak your security system,” I said with disgust in my voice. “How did you let this happen?”

“There was nothing I could do.”

The morning air in my parents’ living room we were sitting in suddenly grew cold upon my skin. I thought I could never feel worse than I did a few days ago when we found out about Scott’s move to Atlanta in that cramped little office, but I did at that moment. I couldn’t believe I had been living at my parents’ house for so much of the time when Scott was lurking at least outside of the house, and maybe even inside.

“Do you think he got in the house?”

“I have no idea. There are no cameras or anything in here, just the alarm system, but I swear to you I check every inch of this house in the morning, when I get home from work and before I go to sleep. Even the guest room. I swear to you.”

***

It was fitting that Scott looked so much like a ghost, because for all intensive purposes, he pretty much was. The cops started taking my case a little more seriously when it was revealed Scott had followed me to Atlanta, but they couldn’t find out a single thing about him.

The cops found no birth or census records for Scott. The paperwork they got from the security company was light and contained what was believed to be mostly false information. His name may not have actually been Scott Lynn for all anyone ever knew. The only information anyone got was from the security company who was able to track down a technician who said he got drinks with him a few times after work said he liked whiskey sours.

I was not the least bit surprised, but Scott had zero social media presence at all. This confirmed my theory that everyone under the age of 35 who has zero social media presence is probably some kind of violent or sexual criminal.

Well… that’s not entirely true. Scott had a social media presence, it just wasn’t his own.

Immediately after hearing about Scott’s move to Atlanta I started doing social media digging into my cousin Felicia. Despite my pleas of never putting me on her profiles, Felicia would still occasionally put pictures of me on Facebook or Instagram in various group shots.

I was reviewing Felicia’s posted photos from the past few months to see how many I was in and if there was some way I could be tracked in them when I noticed something that would make my stomach drop just the same way it had when I watched the video of Scott lying next to me. There was a presence in nearly every recent picture Felicia had posted on social media that included me in an open public place in the past few months… the silhouette of Scott.

There we were smiling in the park for a friend’s birthday and a tall, slender, dark-haired figure lurked in the distant background. At a darkened bar, there he was off in the distance saddled up to the bar. The last picture I clicked upon was the worse. A small get together with friends in the grassy courtyard of the apartment building where I lived with Felicia, I could see a faint figure walking on the sidewalk across the street from where we were picnicking.

I couldn’t even handle it anymore. I wanted to throw the laptop across the room, go up to my room, curl up and die. I felt helpless against everything. I didn’t even feel safe in the room I grew up in with the door locked. Worse yet, I didn’t truly trust my dad anymore. Why had he not told me about the video of Scott outside of their house when he first got it? Maybe this was why mom lost her mind all of those years ago?

This is where I have to explain I haven’t been completely honest while telling this story and why I can’t completely call my dad out without feeling like a hypocrite. I may have been referring to the house as my parents’ house, but it had pretty much just been my dad’s house for the past 14 years.

We never figured out exactly what it was. After a lot of waffling, the doctor’s eventually just said my mom had a stroke. I thought it was extremely early onset Alzheimer’s or late onset schizophrenia, but what the hell did I know, I was just a teenager. Regardless, 14 years ago my mother completely changed. She went from being an outgoing social and financial stallion who was a partner at a law firm, to a nearly bed ridden shut-in that had a lot of trouble forming coherent sentences.

I was young, but I could tell my dad didn’t really know what to do. There was nothing too physically wrong with my mom. I guess her blood pressure and cholesterol ended up being a little high and she had to take medication for it, but other than that, all of her problems appeared to be with communication.

What ended up happening with her pains me to even try and explain, I try to hate my dad for it sometimes before I am able to convince myself I wouldn’t really know what to do in the situation either. My mom ended up moving to the guest room next to my parents’ room and down the hall from mine. For the past 14 years, my mom has spent 99.9 percent of her time in that room mostly lying in bed and watching TV. Every once in a while she would come downstairs to get food, but mostly my dad and I just brought it to her. As far as I knew, she had never left the house during the entire 14-year stretch.

Whenever I was home, I would come into her room and talk to her for at least a few minutes or so, but it was not easy. She would get very upset when even me and I my dad got too far into the room and all she seemed to be able to talk about was what was directly going on in the room, or what was on TV. Usually our conversations revolved around her complaining about the color of the walls of the room, a loud toilet or Dr. Phil. It was pretty fucking awful.

I could tell my social media revelations rattled my dad just as much as they did me because he immediately called the police and screamed at them right next to me for 10 minutes about how they should have an officer permanently parked outside of our house at night. He also called Felicia with me and demanded she follow my routine of living at her parents’ house in the suburbs until Scott was apprehended. I asked my dad if he could also follow up with the family lawyer about a restraining order we had tried to file against Scott, but he reminded me that you cannot file a restraining order against someone who technically doesn’t appear to exist on paper.

My next demand to my dad was that we go spend the night in a hotel but he wouldn’t move on it either. His explanation was understandable. He didn’t want to leave my mother in the house alone and there was no way in hell she was going to go stay at a hotel. He didn’t want me going to stay in a hotel without him either.

My dad came up with a solution that worked for me. He spent the rest of the afternoon scouring the Internet for the scariest-looking private investigator he could find in the LA area. We settled on an Armenian guy named Buddy who looked like the character Zangief from the game Street Fighter and who had excellent reviews on Yelp. Before nightfall, Buddy was parked on the curb in front the house in a black Cadillac chain vaping and listening to hardcore rap.

Buddy’s presence and the appreciation I had for my dad spending the entire day helping me had soothed me enough to where a few drinks over the dinner we ordered from my favorite pizza place from childhood sounded like a good idea. The herby-sweet gin and tonics my dad knew how to mix up so well were working like chamomile tea to my haunted soul.

The world’s oldest sleeping medication, alcohol, had done the trick. Not long after dinner, I climbed the stairs up to my room with such exhaustion I could barely conquer the handful of steps. Utterly gassed, I stumbled into my room, shut the door and locked in behind me and tucked myself into bed.

***

I awoke to the sound of feet shuffling outside of my bedroom door.

I had managed to fall asleep for the first time since I had heard about Scott’s move to Atlanta but my slumber didn’t last long. An alarm clock that read 12:34 am meant I hadn’t even been asleep for an hour

The amount of alcohol made me a little calmer than I should have been, but was still right back on edge for the most part. I jumped up out of my bed and scrambled for the mace that now permanently rested on my nightstand. My eyes shot over to the little slice of light that cut through the crack in the bottom of the door, but there was nothing there.

A touch more at ease, I jumped back upon the bed and sat up with my back against the headboard. I tried to catch my breath and ease for a moment and focused my eyes on the moonlit window.

I immediately noticed something out of the ordinary with the window. There was something slimy and shimmery stuck to the top of the window with little flecks of something white in it. I got up from the bed and took a closer look. I could tell what it was right away. It was an exploded egg.

The sight of the egg took me back to a hazy memory of the night before – awaking for a brief moment after hearing a couple of thumps. It was one of those memories that you at first aren’t really sure if it was a dream or real because it was so brief and clouded by the blanket of boozy sleep.

This memory sparked a realization… the video my dad showed me wasn’t really from months ago. It was from last night. It made much more sense. The neighborhood kid had probably been caught last night and his parents probably gave my dad the incriminating video this morning. But why would my dad lie and say it was from months ago?

I didn’t have time to think up my own answer. There were footsteps again, but this time there were shadows of feet in the crack beneath my bedroom door.

I let out a shallow scream and ran back over to the pepper spray.

“Katherine,” I recognized the voice that whispered through the door so quietly I could barely hear it.

It was my mom.

“Mom,” I whispered back.

My mom quickly jumped into her usual cadence. She could say words, brief sentences about something recent in her environment, but it was always patchy and vague.

“Skinny. Fucker. I can’t smile,” my mom started in.

I wanted to ask for something more. More clarity, but I knew it was hopeless, I just let her go on into my door.

“He’s, he’s, he’s, he is,” she stuttered. “He is staying. Ugly black hair.”

All it took was that last line to make me know what my mom was talking about and realize another lie my dad had told me. He had said he checked every inch of the house when he did his thorough search of the house earlier every day, but he had probably never, or at least rarely checked my mom’s entire room. My mom would physical attack you with her rarely-clipped nails if you did too much prodding in her room. I bet he just opened the door and called it good.

I frantically thought of where my cell phone was to call the police, but quickly realized I had left it downstairs in my drunken absent mindedness.

My mother’s voice interrupted my frantic scrambling.

“He’s been in room. Days. I think, looking, for you.”

Just as my mom finished, another pair of shadowy feet appeared in the bottom crack of the door and I screamed as loud as I could.

Part III

I heard the door to the master bedroom down the hallway shaking like it was holding back a caged rhino. The sound of my dad wailing against the door drowned out some more disjointed statements from my mom and what sounded like the faint whispering of a man. I wanted to scream at my dad to shut the fuck up so I could hear what the man who I assumed was Scott whispered into the door, but didn’t get that chance.

The racket coming from the direction of my dad’s door came to a head and I heard my dad’s feet stomp down the hallway and fly down the stairs. I listened to my dad tearing about the first floor of the house over the sound of my heaving breathing and my mother making eerie statements.

“Can’t watch you go,” my mother said just outside of the door.

“Fuck,” I heard the single word burst out of my dad’s mouth from the first floor before I heard him run back up the stairs.

“Katherine,” my dad’s voice boomed through the door followed by ragged breaths.

“What the fuck just happened?” I asked.

“He got out the backdoor.”

“Scott?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him. He shoved a cabinet against the outside of my bedroom door. I had to break down the door with a golf club.”

I didn’t respond.

“Can you open the door? It’s okay, it’s just me and your mom out here.”

I turned the lock and opened the door to reveal my dad standing shirtless in the hallway with my mom wallowing behind him.

He looked upon me with sweat beading down his face.

“He slipped out into the woods out back, but Buddy is following him. You can come out if you want.”

I thought about it silently for a moment. I stared at my sweating dad and my raving derelict mother who was fidgeting about behind him.

“No, that’s okay. I’m just going to stay in here for the rest of the night.”

I started to shut the door, but noticed something in my dad’s hand… a crumpled piece of paper.

“What’s that?” I asked with my eyes on his hand.

“Oh, uh, just something I found. Just some trash.”

“Can I see it?”

“Sure,” my dad answered in a tone that made it clear he was reluctant to give me the paper.

I wrung out the lined notebook paper that had been crumpled into a ball in my dad’s hand. A quick glance revealed it was a note, scribbled in tragically sloppy hand writing with an eye liner pencil Scott must have snagged from my mom’s bathroom.

I know someday you’ll have a beautiful…

It cut off there. Scott was probably in the midst of writing his note when my dad made it out of his bedroom and he had to dart away, leaving me with just those seven words that would haunt me for years.

***

My mom had gotten better. The key indicator to me was she was regularly unearthing memories from long before she disappeared into a fog of dementia and she seemed to be able to communicate in a way that didn’t make it seems as if she was a dyslexic reading cue cards.

The night when Scott appeared in my parents’ house and then escaped into the night was almost three years ago and I had had effectively scrubbed away a lot of what happened. It was like a movie you only saw once a long time ago, I remembered the plot, but not the details.

A big part of why it felt like another life was because I had moved on to a completely different life after the in-house incident with Scott. After the incident, I heard about a unique opportunity that could jettison me and my mom far from LA and provide safety. A giant out of commission mental hospital in Washington State tucked into the foothills of the Cascade Mountains had been reopened as an outpatient living facility for those living with mental disabilities and their family members. In an effort to promote support for mental illness the facility was offering very generous rates for those who would like to come live in the community.

It was a fantastic deal. I shared a little, two-bedroom bungalow with my mom. My dad paid the yearly bill and I worked part-time at the facility refurbishing the grounds and buildings that had yet to be remodeled. Only about a quarter of the facility was livable when we made our trek up North and they needed people like me to take care of their ill loved ones and do the remodeling of the rest of the facility in their spare time.

This living situation might sound creepy, especially for someone who had spent a chunk of their life sleeping with a stranger, but it made sense to me. I was no longer really interested in participating in the real world of offices and rented apartments. Scott had tracked me down in two major metropolitans and beaten the expensive home security system in my parents’ McMansion anyways. This opportunity would allow me to shave some of my personal guilt about my mother away by helping her, give me some income and allow me to live in a secluded place with tight security.

Besides, the facility could not have been more beautiful. Classic and sprawling, the massive facility cut into a forest of thick evergreens and was remodeled by interior design students from a local college as part of an internship program. Overflowing with classic architecture, mood lighting, exposed brick and flowing ivy, the place actually looked like something out of a European fairy tale romance.

My days had turned into a nice little routine. I would wake up around 10:30, make some coffee for my mom and I and we would sit on our porch facing a lush courtyard with a colossal fountain that looked like it belonged on a street corner in Rome. We would usually sit for an hour or so discussing the past - my mom’s life even before she met my dad, my childhood - until the last drops in our coffee mugs were long cold. I then went to work on the facilities for the afternoon and when done would spend the night cooking a nice dinner in the bungalow with my mom and we would watch TV or movies until we went to sleep.

I wasn’t completely alone with my mother. I had made a friend. Carson was a security guide at the facility who seemed to be the only other person on the entire campus who was under the age of 40. He was a mountain of a man who had at least 10 inches and 100 pounds on me but held it all softly. He was like a giant teddy bear complete with ears that stuck out to the side and a permanent smile.

My friendship with Carson started when he brushed past me one day on campus and I noticed the distinct smell of weed upon him. It took a while, but I eventually slid into a comfortable conversation with him in line in the cafeteria. Before you knew it, we were ducking off into the jogging trails carved into the woods to vape just about every day.

It was the first time I had formed a true relationship of any kind with someone in the past three years and even though I was still apprehensive, it could not have felt better. The fact Carson was objectively a gentle soul made it really easy as well. One time we had planned to meet out in the jogging trails to vape in the afternoon and I got there a little earlier than anticipated to find Carson knelt down, cradling a mouse which had been maimed by a bird. I stayed off in the distance and listened to the man who looked like an offensive lineman speak soft comforting words to the tiny animal before he tucked it into his pocket once he heard me walking in his direction.

It was these kinds of things that always made me feel safe with Carson. The fact we were smoking in what in my humble opinion was the creepiest area of the entire campus was an absolute testament to how much I trusted him. Some people may have been terrified of the long abandoned mental hospital rooms which still had the chairs where people were strapped down and lobotomized may have scared the bulk of people, but the jogging trails were much more frightening to me.

The jogging trails were sawdust floored paths that weaved through the woods which surrounded the facility like the veins in your arms. Shaded by the towering evergreens above, the trails were dark even on the sunniest of days and sprawled for acres in a shadowy maze that seemed to have no right or reason what so ever. The trails were such a twisted labyrinth it was actually suggested by facility staff numerous times they be closed off and at the very least not be allowed to be used if you were by yourself. They were so long Carson actually said they could be reached by a short walk through the woods by his house a few miles away.

It was on those shadowy paths I would get my first true therapy. Carson and I would walk the trails together vaping and soothing our brains and I would talk about my life while excluding the details about Scott and he would tell me about his horrific, but enthralling life growing up in foster homes in the rural forests of Washington state. It seemed like whenever I was tempted to divulge my own dark secrets to him, he would tell me a new story that lowered the bar for how bad people can be to children and I would have to tuck my own problems back into an entitled folder.

I had formed a deep, deep bond with Carson, but I wasn’t sure what the exact emotion tied to that was. Love? I don’t know. I had an utter fondness for him and I could tell he did for me, but I also wasn’t sure what emotion he was attaching to me. It had been more than a year that we had been having our vapes and talks but he had never made even the slightest of moves. It was charming, but also unattractive at the same time. If he truly had feelings for me, he was not going about the right way.

One rainy afternoon it appeared Carson was maybe going to make a move. I ran through the torrential rain to the safe cover of the tall trees which roofed the jogging trails where Carson and I had planned our usual vape session. He told me to meet him there a little later than usual because he had to head to town to pick up some supplies for the office, but his true intention for our delayed meeting was immediately clear when I stepped into the near darkness of the forest and noticed candlelight.

Perched just a few handfuls of yards into the trails were two polyester folding camping chairs and a little wooden table lined with a few candles that added the scent of gardenias to the dense aroma of herby evergreens and wet foliage. Waiting for me in one of the chairs and wearing the biggest smile I have ever seen in my life was Carson.

The first thing Carson did was present me a copper mug filled to the brim with an ice cold Moscow mule. Alcohol was the absolute number one forbidden piece of the contraband on the facility, so this was an extra special treat and a show of excellent memory by Carson. I had once mentioned about a year ago that Moscow mules were one of the top things I missed from my LA life and that copper mugs were an absolute must.

The drink hit me hard seeing as how I hadn’t had a sip of alcohol in years. It was like being 16 again – lush drunk and giddy.

“Let’s go somewhere,” the words clumsily tumbled out of my drunken mouth after I downed the last drops of my first drink.

I knew the exact problem Carson was doing the math on in his head. Employees of the facility and residents were not supposed to interact outside of the grounds - especially residents who had been plied with banned substances. Also, the only town within reasonable driving distance had a population of only 2,000 who all seemed to work at the facility and knew each other. This left Carson with one option so I wasn’t the least bit surprised when he responded to me with this question.

“Want to just go to my house?”

Our operation seemed like something out of a spy movie. I piled into the very back of Carson’s Explorer, covered myself with a sleeping bag and we drove out of the facility after a quick check in with the front gate guard.

I burst out into childish laughter as soon as we were far enough away from the entrance to where I could emerge from the cover of the sleeping bag and climb up into the passenger’s seat next to Carson. I actually hadn’t ridden in a car since I arrived at the facility so the experience kind of actually felt like riding on a roller coaster as Carson commanded the vehicle on the winding road that meandered upon the hill above the facility.

Carson’s house was an algae-crusted eye sore made of dark wood hidden down a dark road that cut off of the highway. The house was centered in a small clearing of mossy ash trees whose bases were spotlighted by the headlights of Carson’s SUV when we pulled into his muddy driveway right next to a ratty early-90s Honda CRV.

I should have been scared, but the double shot of vodka in the Moscow mule was giving me confidence and the promise of more and Carson’s romantic gestures were drowning my fears. I followed Carson out of the car and up the steep stairs that led to the front door of his rustic home.

The second Moscow mule I sipped on as I sat on a worn couch put me at ease with the dated eeriness of Carson’s living room. The soundtrack of soft rock music helped as well along with the hulking body of Carson stretched out next to me onto the couch.

Our house party started out exceptionally well. It could not have felt more refreshing to be just somewhere else than the facility. Even though I loved my life, the stagnation of the place had started to wear on me.

The only thing bugging me was I noticed we had been listening to the same song now for nearly an hour when Carson got up to make our third round of drinks.

I wasn’t sure what song it was, but it sounded like what I recognized vaguely as Pearl Jam. I had no idea what the lyrics were, but I kind of recognized the chorus and I could tell by the urgency of the music and the lead singer’s voice the song was coming to an end.

After the final chorus the song had a painfully intense moment when the lead singer broke his usual cadence and sang some tragic final words I didn’t remember until I heard them trickling out of the speakers that were connected to a laptop in the corner of the room.

I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life,

I know you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky,

But why, why, why can’t it be, can’t it be mine?

Once I heard the words sung through the speakers, I instantly recognized that first line from Scott’s note he wasn’t able to finish back at my parents’ house.

“Carson? Why is this song on repeat?” The question shot off my tongue rapid fire in the direction of the kitchen where Carson was making our drinks.

“Uh, yeah, sorry. That’s my roommate’s computer, I forgot it was on. He’s obsessed with that song for some reason,” Carson answered back from the kitchen.

My entire body tensed.

Carson went on before I could ask another question.

“You know, you can probably turn that off, I’m pretty sure he’s upstairs asleep.”

My body’s pulse of tension glued me to the couch as Carson finished.

“I’ll go check.”

I heard Carson’s massive form trudge up the stairs in a run and then I heard a crash and a hideous scream.

Fighting my body’s tightened instincts I flew off of the couch and towards the front door. I made it there in a few leaping steps and threw a look over my shoulder as I opened the rickety wooden thing and saw a faint glimpse of Scott tearing out of the kitchen.

I burst out the front door, rumbled down the steps of the front porch and felt a downpour of rain fall upon me once I started sprinting away from the house. I could hear furious feet pounding after me when I ran through the driveway in the direction of the dark woods.

One memory stuck out in my head as I pumped my arms and legs as fast as I could in the night – Carson had mentioned the jogging trails that surrounded the facility were a short distance from the woods around his house. I wasn’t exactly sure what direction from the house the trails would be, but I figured continuing my strides in a straight line towards the trees would be my only really shot no matter where they were. I just put my head down and pressed on with the sound of Scott’s feet still behind me.

After ripping through a few shrubs and branches about 20 yards into the forest, I discovered I had played my cards right. I found myself sprinting down the soggy wood ships of the jogging paths with the sound of heavy rain beating down upon the dark canopy of the tops of the trees above me. I took no time to check if Scott was still trailing me, just kept sprinting into the blue near darkness, hoping the path I was on would lead me towards the facility.

I could only maintain my speed for a few more minutes. I soon found myself trudging through the soggy wood shavings at a much slower pace with my mouth heaving out labored breaths. Unable to move much further without vomiting and with no sounds of footsteps still trailing me, I slowed to a brisk walking pace and shot a look over behind my shoulder.

There was nothing there. Just the tumbling of heavy raindrops working their way down from the leaves of the trees above.

Without any threats in sight I came to a complete stop to catch my breath for a moment and assess the situation. I may not have been able to see Scott, but he could have been anywhere, and regardless, I was far from out of the woods (literally), even if he had given up on me and returned to his home. I knew first hand just how big of a maze the jogging trails were and I was at the very far end of them, a few miles from the safety of the facility at best. On top of that, there was a more than good chance Scott was still pursuing me in the dark, twisting arteries of the trails and it was only a matter of time until the unpredictable paths the trails led us on crossed us in the dark.

I pressed on as swiftly as my body would let me, maintaining a steady jog while my chest heaved and my heart raced. My brain was being tested as well. The two drinks had faded from my brain and left me in a hazy fog of mental fatigue. Combine that with the fact there was only a little tickle of moonlight that pushed its way through the canopy of trees to give me just a hue of light on my journey and the whole thing felt like I was running through some endless nightmare in my own head.

A snap of brush from the outside of the path just in front of me sent my reflexes into a panic. I stopped just before I crashed into a deer. I screamed in the poor things face and it galloped away into the night, leaving me stiff and wide eyed in the jogging path.

I used the opportunity to catch my breath for a moment, but it was a mistake. I heard the splashing of footsteps come up from behind me on the path.

Without a look, I took off again going forward, but soon had to dart to the right when the path made a Y.

It was another poor choice. The path I had chosen was steeply uphill and I quickly lost steam.

Behind me, I could hear the splashing footsteps gaining on me, but there wasn’t anything I could do, the grade ahead of me was a challenge and it would be a few more yards before I crested the slope. The math taking place in my head told me the steps behind me would soon be upon me…

But then they stopped.

I started to whip my head around to check on what may or may not have been behind me, but had to stop. There was a figure ahead of me, just past the top of the crest of the path. It was hard to make it out, but it was tall, dressed in white and stepping up to me at a steady pace.

It was Scott.

I started to backpedal, but it was too late, Scott had the higher ground and was just a few yards away from me. I saw his dark eyes grow wide when he laid them upon me and started picking up his pace.

“No. No. No. No,” I cried out into the wet night, but I knew it was helpless.

I tripped backwards down the slippery slope of the path and fell hard upon my backside. I looked up helpless as Scott strolled up to me.

Scott stepped down to stand over me, his lip quivered and his body shivered, cold.

He had something to say. His mouth started to open.

Before I could close my eyes or scream…

Scott was engulfed and taken out of sight.

I scrambled up to my feet and saw what I quickly recognized as Carson wrestling with Scott in the brush next to the trail. I could hear both men yelling out incoherent curses until the much larger Carson fully gained control and pinned Scott on his back.

Carson started to pummel my frail stalker, but a flash of silver in the night caught my eye…

Scott had wrestled a gun out of pocket.

“He’s got a…

I didn’t have to finish my warning, Carson twisted the barrel of the gun away from his face and towards Scott before what sounded to me like a bomb going off shook the woods and I turned away from the image of blood erupting from Scott’s face.

“He tried to shoot me. You saw it. You saw it,” Carson turned and yelled at me from a face covered in bloody scratches through a mouth that could barely breathe.

At first, I couldn’t get anything out. My jaw just quivered as Carson stepped away from Scott’s lifeless body and he came up to me and wrapped me in a hug.

It took a few moments, but I would eventually get some words out that I cried into Carson’s chest.

“Thank you.”

*****

The past few months had been the most restful of my life since before I knew about Scott. Knowing he was officially dead and gone allowed for me to start returning to normal. I had started a full-time desk job at the facility, started quietly dating Carson and was planning on bringing up getting an apartment in town together so we could date officially since I would no longer be a resident of the facility.

In a major step forward, I had agreed to go on a road trip with Carson across the mountains and over to central Washington where he said the spring was warm and beautiful. I was sitting in his car waiting for him to finish his shift and enjoying the lush scenery out the passenger side window when I saw something that pulled at my heartstrings. A female deer stepped out of the cover of the forest by the jogging trails and out into a golden field behind the facility.

I had no way of being 100 percent sure, but it sure looked like the deer I ran into the night when Scott was chasing me. The deer wasn’t alone though, two spring fawns eventually trailed it out of the woods and I had to reach for my phone. A quick snap of my phone and the moment was saved forever.

I decided to share the moment with Carson and immediately sent the picture to his phone. I jumped a little bit when a digital chime shot out from the cup holder next to my seat.

I snatched up his phone and saw a little notification that explained his phone was out of memory. He would have to delete some files to receive my picture.

Carson had some weird ass Windows Phone or something, so I wasn’t exactly sure to work it, but after a little bit of playing around with it, I ended up on an album where I was presented with a screen of endless tile previews of photos and videos.

Figuring I would help him out and let him receive my amazing photo at the same time, I started scrolling through to find random photos and videos I was sure he could easily part ways with. I started with the oldest and scrolled my all the way back to a few years ago, around when I had just moved up to the facility.

The first handful of photos and videos I deleted were easy to spot - accidental photos of black taken within a pocket or quick videos taken but then aborted before they went anywhere. However, one of those quickly-aborted videos started to raise the little hairs on the back of my neck.

One of the quick little videos took place in the night, a few years ago, in a locale I knew very well. It was just a few seconds, but the little strip of grass behind my bedroom in the bungalow where I stayed was unmistakable.

The next video I pulled up would be much more terrifying. It was almost complexly dark, but you could just barely make out what was going on… shot through the tiny little gaps in the blinds of my bedroom window, you could see my body tucked up in a sea of blankets, sleeping away in the night.

Originally published by Thought Catalog on www.ThoughtCatalog.com

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almighty-god-saved-me-blog · 7 years ago

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What Allows Me to Regain a Happy Life? | The Church of Almighty God

Xiaoping

Later, I had the fortune to accept Almighty God’s work of the last days. In a gathering, I fellowshiped about my process of losing weight to the sisters, and one of them read me a passage of Almighty God’s words: “Your temperament, caliber, appearance, stature, family in which you were born, your job and your marriage, the entirety of you, even the color of your hair and your skin, and the time of your birth were all arranged by My hands. Even the things you do and the people you meet every single day are arranged by My hands, not to mention the fact that bringing you into My presence today is actually My arrangement. Do not throw yourself into disorder; you should proceed calmly” (The Word Appears in the Flesh). The sister fellowshiped, “Everything is predestined by God, including the kind of marriage and family we have, what appearance and skin color we have, when we are fat, and when we are thin. It is not something that anyone or anything could change. What God gives us is all the best, it is all meaningful, but we are not able to obey God’s sovereignty and predestination, and we always feel that everything God bestows is not to our will. We always want to pursue perfectness and oppose God’s sovereignty and change all that God has given us. That is why we have self-harmed and brought ourselves so much pain. Look at such and such in my working unit. In pursuit of beauty, she messed up her nerves when undergoing a lip line surgery and now she has a crooked mouth. Some other people, in order to lose weight, went to have liposuction and died on the spot. The reason these people have encountered such disasters is because they do not understand God’s authority and sovereignty. This is the bitter consequence of their vain attempt to change their fate by themselves.”

Source: What Allows Me to Regain a Happy Life?

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