our invisible string is more of a web

it's 14.2.26 and i love you

When I was eight, I found a spider halfway up my staircase - big, raw-boned, wiry, and dark. My mum was calling me upstairs to my bath, but there wasn’t a way around it. I stood on the second step, frozen and face-to-face, feeling the way its eyes stared straight through me like it knew something I didn’t. I let out a yelp, cried out for mum to come and get me, and refused to leave the bath until I knew it was gone. That night, I dreamt that my house was overflowing with tiny spiders, spreading across my childhood kitchen, underneath doors and into the mouths of my caregivers, until all you could see was a sprawling black mass where my life used to be.

When I picture you at eight, you’re playing with the same spiders I dreamt of. You present them with offerings of bugs and whisper to them like you’re both in on the secret. To you, they were friends. I think if I knew you then, I wouldn’t be so scared of spiders.

I met you eight years later. By 16, my fear of spiders had grown into a fear of everything, especially myself - small, raw-boned, weedy, and drunk. We hung out in fields with people who still roll their eyes when they hear our names. I thought you were loud and intimidating, and I think you thought the same of me. It’s funny to think that you could’ve been mine then, had we been a little less afraid. We dated other people in the same obnoxious friend group, never speaking about the silky string I felt curling around my ring finger, ignoring the ache that resisting the pull towards you caused. Even when we didn’t talk for years, I thought of you every day. I didn’t make a friend that didn’t know your name.

I’ve never really understood why I was so afraid of spiders. They mean no harm, and I’m sure it’s true when they say it’s far more scared of you than you are of it; so much smaller than me, and I’m sure to have killed more than it has. A spider is born the way it is, but humans curate their paths. Even so, I have always felt those eyes, seen them reading something in me in a language I never understood. Maybe that’s where fear stems from - not understanding.

That fear swelled through the people I dated. Fear of the future, and of the present too. If they loved me, it was in a way I didn’t understand - from the other side of the room, going about their lives whilst I cowered in the corner of their ceiling, only moving when they weren’t around lest they crush me under their heel, purposely or carelessly.

The fear grew so big that it became me, and last year when I spun you back to me, all I showed you were fangs and hollow eyes. And I didn’t want you to see anything else, thinking I was better off making friends with the dust bunnies under my bed. I pulled you in to wrap you up, afraid to do anything but take a bite (just a taste, I can handle just a taste, I won’t let it consume me), and to scuttle back to the corner you coaxed me from right after, scared you’d turn and run if you saw on your own terms all the legs and eyes and teeth I had grown since I was 16. But you whispered to me like you were in on my secret, and finally I saw the shining, silky string from my ring finger to yours. It became too obvious to ignore: it didn’t matter how much I bit you, it couldn’t undo the fact that you’d already seen everything in me that I hadn’t seen in myself. Moreso, you already loved me for it.

I never told you, but I had that dream of my whole world collapsing into the endless black pit of legs and eyes almost every night since the first time. Each time, I’d wake up sweating and afraid. But since you became mine (really mine), I haven’t had that dream once. Instead I lay next to you most nights, and sometimes I wake up at 4am just enough to melt into your limbs and listen to you breathing whilst you wrap around me.

Now I’m about to be 22, I’m not so scared of the world, and I’ve sat in the palm of your hand long enough to know that I’m certainly not scared of you. Maybe if I had met you at eight years old I never would have been so scared to begin with, but when I look down at my left hand and its sparkly web leading to yours, I think maybe everything happened the way it was supposed to. We spun this web together, thread by thread, and sometimes we still bite, but I’m a girl now, not a beast, and you’re my boy. I’ve dusted the cobwebs from the corners of my room and you take spiders outside gently with a cup.

If it wasn’t for you, I’d still be small in the dark. I am safe, unafraid, and it is your fault.