Haunting 

Amy DeBellis

Hard to remember now what it felt like, to lift  my whole body up with just my hands. And I was not light, back then. Not the way I am now. My whole skeleton was armored with muscle: heavy deltoids, glutes, hamstrings. Calves that bulged every time I flexed an ankle. Size ten sneakers, rubber soles thick enough to drive a tack through.

Hard to remember what it was like to hoist my upper body over the chin-up bar and then lower it again, my biceps stretching out—deep ache, delicious as honey—my shoulder bones rolling in their sockets, my core held taut like a bowstring. The gravity of the earth pulling me down, until I wrenched myself up again. And again. And again.

The way I could part from the ground so easily. The way I could just decide to leave the earth, to lift  myself off  it, like a bird or a breath of wind.

The sideways glances of the other gym-goers: surprised, impressed, often envious. And I always noticed. How could I not? The whole gym was walled with mirrors. Pride would flush through me along with the adrenaline, blazing through my brain and my body—I’d feel it buzzing in my teeth, along my jaw, down my spine. Finally, after twelve chin-ups, I would drop to the floor, landing in a crouch, my knees bending smoothly and instinctively to absorb the impact. 

These chin-ups were just an add-on. A grand finale. The real effort I made in the gym was in the sculpting of my lower body  through heavy hip thrusts.  This was prompted by a boyfriend telling me I had a flat ass—so I tried to build a butt to please him. He was never happy with my efforts, even after I added four inches of solid muscle back there. But I was. Even after I broke up with him, I kept going to the gym, reveling in my increasing strength. At my peak, not long before I was diagnosed, the weight on the barbell was nearing three hundred pounds.

After my workouts, when I went back upstairs to my apartment, my glutes already so sore that it hurt to walk, the adrenaline would still be coursing through me. Thudding against the inside of my body like a trapped swarm of bees. So I’d pull on my boxing gloves and face down the heavy stand—its base weighted down with sand and water, a hundred and fifty pounds of it—and hit it over and over again, slamming my fists into its side, until I’d knocked it over. My knuckles would bruise against the insides of my gloves. My hands would form such tight fists that my nails would cut into my palms, leave me with little crescent moons of dried blood. Like the tiny red stems of flowers.  

I was twenty-five years old and in a few short months, all of this would be behind me forever. A road tapering, blurring, graying into the past. Time moves in one direction only.

…

I have lived in a single room, a bedroom in my parents’ house, for four years now. I haven’t walked more than three hundred steps in a day since 2021. My usual count is around two hundred: that’s the amount of steps required for me to go back and forth from my bed to the bathroom six or seven times daily. I have thus far managed to escape a commode, or bedpans, or diapers. I have friends who are not as lucky.

I can sit up in bed, or on the floor, for a few hours at a time. I can listen to music, I can read, I can write. But I can’t do much else. My disease, a postviral illness called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, performs its own alchemy, a transmutation from hell: it turns exercise into poison and sensory stimulation into agony.  It turns the exertion of sobbing into an exhaustion so profound that it’s impossible to roll over in bed. It turns the sound of people walking downstairs into a stabbing pain in your head, but you’re so weak by that point that you can’t lift your arm to put in your earplugs. It turns even a surplus of calories and rest into a complete energy deficit at the cellular level. It strips away everything you thought you couldn’t live without—a social life, the simple joy of a walk in nature, hobbies and dreams and a career—and then it takes more, and more. Yet despite it all, you find yourself still living, and still living, and still living.

And sometimes that is the horror.

…

“The good news is, it doesn’t kill you. The bad news is, it doesn’t kill you.” 

…

Now: I am twenty-nine years old.

Now: I am not an athlete. Barring a scientific breakthrough, I will never be an athlete again. The recovery rate for my illness is five percent, and nearly all of these recoveries take place within the first two years. 

Now: my eyelids sag with exhaustion, like windows trying to shutter. A strange elasticity has appeared in my skin: I can pull the flesh of my throat out past my ear. My doctors tell me it is the breakdown of collagen and connective tissues, caused not by age but by my illness. I’m a medical marvel. A girl made of Silly Putty whose muscles were once as hard as bone.

Now: I see nothing when I flex my ankles, no movement beneath the skin. My calf muscles are gone, and so are the muscles of my stomach, my arms, my back. My flesh is soft and pudgy, melting around my skeleton; my skin has gone white as a cataract from years in a darkened room.

I go to sleep and in my dreams I can run, I can fight, I can lift three hundred pounds in a hip thrust again. (Yes: I did reach that number, once.) I can feel the knurling of the dumbbells dragging against the calluses on my palms, the cold metal of the barbell as it rolls over my hipbones. In my dreams, I occupy a place I will never see again in waking life.

Now: I am the object of no one’s envy. Except for those who are sicker than me, mired even more deeply in this illness than I am. They envy that I can walk, that I can talk, that I can brush my own teeth and wash my own body. They squint up at me as if through water or thick glass.

Now: I am a haunting, a scratched-out memory, an incantation. I am sentences unstrung from one another, a life made up of repeating, identical days. The road behind me has long since softened into darkness.

Amy Debellis is the author of the novel All Our Tomorrows (CLASH Books 2025). Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, and can be found in X-RA-Y, Uncharted, Write or Die, Monkeybicycle, The Pinch, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. She lives in New York.