I am trying to find help. I search the Internet for the living relatives of witnesses to Mercy Brown’s exhumation, as though they have something to give to me, presuming they’d be willing to part with it. Same with historians, folklorists, and the gatherers of story, and I think they might come closest to giving me what I want or need. In the end I know they’ll break my heart because they will approach the truth but not get all the way there. Those Internet searches don’t last long, though, and then I randomly scroll through social media feeds and blogs of people I know or used to know and then total strangers and sometimes I pretend to be those other people, and it’s a relief, and I imagine I’m like them, or like you: angry and sad, yes, but also dumbly hopeful.

Then I pretend that I’m helping everyone by taking and consuming their online confessions and their pain. I pretend I’m a different kind of monster.

What if the part you so achingly want to fix, change, banish, or destroy is the part that is fundamentally you?

I still don’t know who can help me. So, I haven’t asked anyone.

There’s a part of me that thinks/hopes/wishes none of this is real. I haven’t asked for help because I’m afraid to learn I could’ve been helping myself all along and I’ve wasted so much time, a lifetime, and I haven’t asked for help because I’m trying my best and I don’t want to know my best isn’t good enough, will never be good enough, and I don’t ask for help because help means coping with the terrible thing and I don’t want to cope, to simply go on, and I childishly think coping hides the fact that there is no purpose and no reason for anything.

Fucking hell. The author is a monster. The memoir novel is a vampire, and it needs you to breathe life into its voice of the dead; like any book, it needs you to survive.

I wish I never fucking wrote any of this.

* * *

Yet here I am. And I have a new plan.

I will find Mercy.

* * *