🪟 My Personal Thief

It wasn’t long before I realized I had my own personal thief. He’d come in every night around three and I’d pretend to be asleep. I didn’t dare move a muscle. Not out of fear, but because I pitied him. He was terribly obvious; he left the window open behind him each time, and he was clumsy, too. Once, he’d spilled a glass of water all over my laptop, and I had to focus hard to keep from laughing as he tried and tried to turn it back on. I didn’t want him to think he’d failed.

He left the laptop, anyway, and when I took it to the shop the next day all they could show me was a rust-colored, corroded battery. My life’s work, gone in an instant. But all I could think about was the disappointment my thief must have felt. He’d let such a prize slip through his fingers. The poor thing, I couldn’t stand his embarrassment. 

I was empathetic like my mother. She was a saint in her day, my grandmother had always said so. I even had a stranger once stop me on the street and they cried into my chest at the loss of her. I comforted them, I said: “It’s alright now, it’s alright. She’s up there looking down over us.” I was so proud of myself for saying that; it was something my mother would’ve said. I even pictured the words coming out of her mouth, not mine. I’d been told she had a soft, almost whisper-like voice and a laugh that spread slow and warm like honey. 

After a week with my thief, I thought it best to hide the rest of my valuables, and he didn’t find them for a good while. Instead, he took things that didn’t matter to me: a pair of old hiking boots, a chipped ring from a flea market, the last three eggs of a dozen. One day, I woke up to an alert from my credit card company. My social security number had been found on the “dark web.” Whatever that meant. Let them have it. What did a number have to do with me? My real “self” was somewhere trapped inside this body. I thought I’d like to set it free, and sometimes I really believed that if I opened my mouth wide and exhaled hard enough, my soul might rise up and escape from between my lips, and then I’d be free of the body, of all its terrible urges. Yes, it was the body that reacted violently, it wasn’t me—the blood on my hands, not my hands, the body’s, I could be free of it if I let go, surrender.

I left my thief a key that very night to prove I was serious. Of course, I half-hid it beneath an envelope, as if I’d forgotten it was even there. I wanted him to think it was a lucky find, and yes, he practically skipped out of the apartment that night, until he tripped, fell, and knocked over a vase that had once been my mother’s. I knew she wouldn’t mind; it had been lost in helping another. 

He found my valuables beneath the bed a week later and I felt a strange sense of pride as he rummaged around down there. I wanted to take his hand and say, “Congratulations, my boy!” A stand-in for the proud parent he surely never had. In fact, I was certain his father had been a thief before him, the King of All Thieves perhaps, and there was pressure—too much, even—on those slim shoulders that had so easily slipped through the panes of my windows. I was happy to help him achieve his dreams, even as he slowly drained me of all my possessions, as if erasing me from the world. I felt grateful to him, really, to his work. My thief was purifying me, allowing me to sacrifice. Each night he brought me closer to myself—the real self—that last exhalation escaping the body. 

My mother, so pure. An old family friend once described her presence so light her feet hardly touched the floor, and they surely never left a mark. It made sense, then, why she’d had to die so young: non-existence was the only form of positive existence.

Soon, most everything was gone. Only the furniture remained, and I couldn’t see a way for him to bring it down the stairs alone. I wanted to help, but my offer would ruin the unspoken contract between us. Still, I worried he might not be able to finish the job, so I decided to dismantle the furniture section by section, to parcel the pieces out into small boxes that were manageable on the stairs. My mother would have been so proud of me, I thought, before reminding myself that I wasn’t doing any of this for recognition or emotional reimbursement. My father once told me that any gratitude, any kind of attention, had made my mother blush. She’d been red the last time I’d seen her too, frenzied as the wind. My only memory of her pierced through the obscure layers of others’—limp fingers hung from bruised knuckles, dry wall crumbling beneath her strength…

But she was dying then, and it was the cruelty of the body, the pain it was causing her, that had twisted her up inside; an animal clawing, scraping, howling at its cage, and yes, I knew that desperation well—the snap of the nose as the fist makes contact, no way to pull back from the heat of ferocity, no way to hold tight before that great unravelling which felt so much like freedom—but that hadn’t been me, only the body, just the body! Sometimes I even controlled the body, like I was doing now, using its hands to tape up the boxes, its arms to push, push, push away everything toward some other body to claim as its own. Oh, I was so tired of the force required to make the body do my work, when all it really wanted was to grow claws and embrace the animal of the blood. If I could give my body away—

I wondered how he’d feel, my thief, if I snipped off my arm and left it in a little box with a bow around it? My mother, scratching at the doors of my mind, wild as a beast. 

She looked me dead in the eye, she said: 

“I thought I was dissolving. I was so sure I’d pass right through…”

I was sad when the last box was gone. I slept on the floor and wished my thief would return to me, one last time. The creak of the door. I sat up. I knew then that there was one last thing I could give, and I would give it, yes, I would give it. 

“I’m in here,” I called, the first time I’d spoken to him. He followed the sound of my voice. I lay very still and thought: if I breathe out real hard… His shadow fell over me. I was surprised that, when he grabbed me, I jolted. I felt myself come into clear focus. I closed my eyes, tried to let go, surrender—I thought I was dissolving—but the body made to pull away. 

No one ever told me to suffer silently, I did that myself, all on my own, because I knew I could take it. I could take it! I’d learned early on that there was strength in that kind of selflessness, a sort of holy magnetism my mother had carried with such ease, but my body always revolted. It kicked out at him, and he groaned. It kicked out again, and I liked the feel of it this time: the firm contact of my boundaries coming up against his. The body reacts when the soul is small and tired—my mother beating bloody at the wall—the body says, “I’ve had enough! I’ve had enough!”

I threw him off of me. The body reared back, and I leaned with it, in tandem, in magnificent synchronicity, kicking with all my might and screaming:

“No! No! You can’t have it. It’s the only thing that’s mine.”