Digesting Darkness

The first time I ate someone's sorrow, it was by mistake.

My aunt had died. At the funeral, my cousin wouldn't cease crying. She gripped her mother's wedding ring so tightly in her fist the knuckles went white. When she hugged me, she pressed the ring into my palm.

"I can't look at it anymore," she said. "Just take it away."

I stuck the ring in my pocket. On the drive home, a strange heat ran through my belly—like I'd swallowed a shot of good whiskey. By the time I arrived at the house, I felt fine. Light. Almost euphoric.

Later, my cousin called to thank me. She'd slept last night for the first time in weeks. "It's like a weight lifted," she said.

It took me two weeks to fit the pieces together.

I was stress-eating at a gas station cherry cupcake—the one with that nuclear-red frosting that colors everything it touches. The ring was still in my pocket. I pulled it out, and some sticky frosting clung to the metal. Without considering, I licked it off.

The ring melted in my mouth like cotton candy. The heat spread through me again, more intensely this time.

I comprehended then. In some way, I had consumed her sorrow.

Five years later, it was a business—not technically, you can't list "Grief Eater" on a business card. But word spread to the desperate.

It worked like this: You brought something you'd had that made you think of your loved one who died, something heavy in grief. I ate it, and your grief disappeared. I charged by intensity—a thousand for a parent, five hundred for an off-sibling, two-fifty for a grandparent. Pets were a flat hundred.

But I never told patients where their grief went. It did not evaporate. It lived inside of me.

I had ingested the emotional anguish of seventy-eight deceased loved ones. Each and every one of them left behind a whisper, a memory, a scratch that wasn't my own.

I called them the Chorus.

They were ambient noise most of the time—a TV playing in another room. But lately, they'd been louder. Louder and more demanding. Whispers turned into talks, talks turned into arguments, and then cries.

Let us out. Let us look at them. We miss them.

I turned my back to them and ate. The warmth was addictive—something better than any drug I'd ever tried. The venture was just a facade to go after that high.

Since childhood, I had been having the same dream—powerless in my body, awake but unable to move or speak, as some other force propelled me from within. I'd wake up screaming, drenched in sweat, relieved to be myself.

The dreams diminished but became more intense with every year. Being a passenger in my own body was more frightening to me than death.

I never linked the nightmares with what I was doing—until it was too late.

A rainy Tuesday, a woman handed me her brother's baseball cap. He had taken his life three months previously. She had been awake ever since.

Her hands were shaking as she gave me the cap. "Will it hurt?" she asked.

"Not you," I replied.

When she left, I locked the door and forced the cap into my mouth. The cloth dissolved on my tongue, and a bitter flood of sorrow overwhelmed me, causing me to weep. I chewed faster, following the heat.

This time was different.

When the last strands dissolved, I heard a man's voice, as clear as day: "Finally."

Then my hands weren't my hands.

I tried to move them, but they stayed flat on the desk. My legs ignored me. My breathing sped up—not by me.

“You’ve been selfish,” the voice said. “Keeping us trapped. Not letting us reach them.”

I tried to speak, but my mouth wouldn’t open.

Panic crawled up my spine.

I was still here, conscious—but not in control.

My nightmare was happening.

“It’s our turn now,” another voice whispered. An old woman’s, unfamiliar. “You’ve kept us quiet long enough.”

The next hours were torture. My body moved without my permission. My hands searched files, found my client list. My mouth practiced voices that weren’t mine. The Chorus was learning to drive.

They let me surface enough to feel the horror.

I screamed inside, but they pushed me back down into darkness.

Being locked up with myself was worse than hurting—buried alive with a window to the world.

They came up with a plan by evening.

I awoke on my kitchen floor, surrounded by shattered glass. The clock displayed 3:47 AM. Nine hours gone.

Seventeen missed calls on my phone with unknown numbers. Blood on my nails. My mouth tasted copper and salt. The world tilted sideways.

What the devil?" I said—words that felt unfamiliar on my lips.

"We've waited for this," a voice said, inside my head but not inside my head. "For someone to have enough of us."

I stumbled to the bathroom, flipped on the light.

My face was wrong—faces not mine, eyes focusing and unfocusing as if someone else was behind them.

"No," I said. "This isn't real.".

"Oh, but it is," the voice replied. "You've made space for us. Now we'll do the same."

My hand rose to my face, but I wasn't moving it.

I tried to scream. Lips closed.

This was my nightmare: being helpless, trapped inside when someone else was behind the wheel. Not metaphorical. Real life.

"Don't struggle," a soft voice whispered. "You'll only make it worse."

The Chorus was not background music anymore. They were a tidal wave—and I got drowned.

They drove my body in, and I was held hostage, trapped inside to watch.

My lips chattered up for my clients at odds, over who got turn next.

"The brother first," my mouth said, speaking as him. "He hasn't seen his sister yet."

My head bobbed as if I had no control over it.

"Twenty minutes at a time," said someone else. "Until we get something worked out.".

They divided me in half like a timeshare.

I rode along.

My body drove to the woman's house—the one who had borne the cap. They rang the doorbell.

Her face twisted from confusion to horror.

"Tommy?" she breathed.

"Hey, sis," my mouth replied, in his voice. "I'm home."

She pulled away. "No. You're the one who stole the cap. What are you doing?"

It's complicated," my lips uttered. "But I needed to see you. To say—it wasn't your fault."

They twisted me like a puppet. I could not scream. All my horrors—possession, loss of control—playing out in grotesque detail.

She cried. "This isn't funny. Get out."

"Remember the summer at Lake Michigan? When I pushed you into the water and you lost your sunglasses? I told you a fish ate them."

Her face went white. "Nobody knew.".

"I did. I do." My hand came out to smother her face. "I need you to do something for me."

"What?"

"Give him something else. Something more sorrowful. My journal. Under the mattress."

No! I screamed inwardly. Don't listen!

But she did not hear.

For three days, they worked with seven clients. Each new voice taken over to collect more tears-filled objects. Journals, photographs, rings, clothing. I consumed them all, adding more voices to the Chorus.

The Chorus grew louder. I shrunk, relegated to a smaller part of my mind.

By day four, I had control only for minutes—most times when they slept.

For those few minutes, I fought—pain, alcohol, head-banging—nothing worked.

They laughed, taking mastery back.

They made me come up only to deliver messages.

"We're visiting the cemetery tomorrow," a voice I knew said. "Time to expand."

"What?"

"Fresh grief is sweetest," another one said. "We'll acquire mourners ourselves."

"No. I won't allow you."

They laughed in my voice. "You don't get to decide anymore. You're the vessel."

I knew they were correct. Fighting against control was pointless.

But I could still ruin the car.

I dived deep inside to my own sorrow—not theirs.

My father's overdose when I was fourteen. My mother's suicide two years afterward. A friend who died in my apartment when I was out buying drugs. All the pain I'd kept buried.

I pulled it up like poison from the well and aimed it at the Chorus.

Death is not dead. Death changes and matures. Feeding it makes it stronger.

My grief overfilled the Chorus's domain.

They screamed.

They'd only been echoes, never the origin.

"Stop!" they cried.

"You wanted sorrow. Here it is. All you can eat."

I pushed every memory through my head—all loss, regret, despair. I'd fled from it, but now I clung to it. It was my weapon.

The Chorus shattered. Some voices disappeared. Others broke apart. The strongest fought back, but faltered.

For the first time in days, I moved my hand with ease.

I pulled myself into the bathroom.

My face gaunt, eyes bloodshot. I looked a decade older.

But they were my eyes again. At least for now.

"This isn't over," a voice spat. "We'll wait. Get stronger."

"No," I said. "You won't."

I opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out a pocket knife—my grandfather's, the one I never used.

I stuck it in my mouth.

Cold metal struck my tongue. I bit down, and it crumbled.

But this time I focused on my grandfather's love—pride in his eyes, whittling lessons.

Joy, love, pride, nostalgia—given the pain.

I had realized my mistake.

Loss is not pain. Loss is love made suddenly homeless, beating in your chest.

Consuming only pain by now, I had created hungry ghosts—fractured people made of sorrow.

I had opened my mouth to tell this to them.

But the Chorus kept silent.

For the time being.

The next day, I returned all the grief-objects I'd collected—not through consumption, but through release.

They were angry. Bewildered. Some begged me to take the grief back.

I couldn't. Wouldn't.

Each returned object lifted a weight. The voices retreated from intruders to memories.

I saw them as wounds to heal—hers and mine.

I slept the first night in months without nightmares.

I stopped taking clients. Moved. Changed my number.

They still found me.

Today, I listen to their stories.

Sometimes that is enough.

Seven days later, a man appeared with his daughter's teddy bear. Cancer. Seven years old.

"Will you take it away?" he wept. "I cannot keep this pain. I cannot live."

I sat with him for hours, listening.

Before he left, I said the truth to him: grief is love with nowhere to go. Pain is the other face of love.

Healing does not mean forgetting.

Keep the bear," I said to him. "She loved it. You loved her. Let it hurt now. It will hurt less, but love remains."

As he turned away with the bear in his arms, something shifted in me.

The Chorus faded.

I still don't understand what I am or how it works.

But I know what I'm not.

I'm not a grief eater anymore.

I'm just someone learning to digest my own.

BU Products