I can’t tell you exactly what we had been doing that night, but I know that we ended up sitting around a bonfire at Ocean beach, huddled together, sharing blankets and passing a bottle of cheap Russian vodka between shivering hands. That period of my life is a blur of dark nights and big feelings – thirteen years old and tasting some kind of independence for the first time, I basked in my actualized preteen fantasies as if they were the heat from the dancing flames before my very eyes. As a younger sibling with an inferiority complex, I had always craved the romanticized, formless concept of “being older.” I did everything in my power to push impatiently past childhood until finally, in the eighth grade, some older friends invited me to go out with them on a Friday night. That night didn’t so much change my life as it presented me with the life that I always knew was waiting for me. Lying to parents, drinking liquor and smoking cigarettes, going to punk shows, casual hookups between friends, stick and poke tattoos, tagging, stealing, singing - no - screaming lyrics into the night, our words painting the stars on the black sky above as we laughed and cried and tripped over each other up and down the streets of the city that had become our playground. San Francisco in the early 2000s – no one will tell you that this wasn’t a special time and place, especially for kids whose parents weren’t paying attention. The nights meshed together into a singular experience that was adolescence, characterized more by a feeling than any singular event.

So when I say I can’t tell you exactly what we had been doing that night, understand that it’s because it was just like any other night. It was windy, there were five or six of us and we had ended up around a bonfire at Ocean Beach, our bare feet digging into the cold sand.

It was Anya who offered the dare. “I bet you won’t go skinny dipping,” she glared across the fire at Oscar. Oscar glared back as the flames cast dancing shadows over his sharp features. A slow smile spread across his face, and without a word he wriggled out of his jacket, pulled his hoodie and t-shirt over his head, dropped his pants and underwear and ran towards the water, dancing and twirling into the darkness.

Now I feel like I have to pause and say that this wasn’t strange behavior. Oscar pretty much got naked at any opportunity and with no apparent regard for modesty or cold. I remember the first time he did it; we had snuck into the Lincoln Park Golf Course and after slipping away for a moment he streaked by us, prancing and yipping like he had just been let out of a laboratory and was touching grass for the first time. This was how Oscar lived – he attended School of the Arts with a concentration in dance, but he also played music, made paintings, and never hesitated to tell us all how much he loved us, how these were the days of our lives, just how real all of this was. He dubbed mixtapes for us from an old cassette player and wrote little songs about his friends. Oscar’s parents were Russian immigrants who were hard working and seemingly neglectful. It had been clear the couple of times that I visited his house that he had even less of a parental presence than the rest of us. Maybe this was why he was so tender with his friends; maybe we were the closest family he ever had.

Moments later Oscar came running out of the darkness, still naked and still prancing but completely dry.

“Aw what’s wrong Osky? Water too cold?” Anya pouted her lips and batted her eyelashes in a mock display of sympathy.

Unfazed, Oscar pushed a flop of blonde hair out of his eyes. “The water is beautiful,” he said. “I just don’t want to go in alone.” His eyes scanned the circle and locked on mine. He gave me a stupid, toothy grin and said, “I want Stevie to come in with me.”

I was the youngest in the group and they got a kick out of making me squirm. It didn’t help that my cheeks flushed red everytime they pushed me to do something that I wasn’t comfortable with. I felt my face get hot. “No, I don’t think so,” I started to say, my eyes darting down to the sand. “I–”

Anya leaned forward and gently held my face in her hands. “Look at him! Oh my God, Oscar, you’re gonna make him cry.”

“No, I–” My eyes met hers and my mind went blank. Big, brown, caked in mascara and shimmering in the light of the fire, in that moment she was everything I had ever wanted. “I’ll do it.”

“Yay!” Anya squealed with delight.

I pushed myself to my feet, heart pounding in my tightened chest, and took my clothes off. Oscar grabbed my hand and smiled. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes. It was the look not only of a grateful friend, but one of a proud father. A look that carried warmth and acceptance. For a moment, I couldn’t feel the icy wind or the eyes on my naked body. All I could feel was love. And the next thing I knew, we were running down the beach towards the surf, shrieking with laughter.

But with each step forward, I became more aware of the ocean ahead. The vast, freezing ocean. I could suddenly hear the waves crashing and the wind screaming in my ears. My heart pounded up into my head and my breaths got shorter. And when my feet hit that sharp, biting water, I froze. Oscar kept running, though. And I could only watch as he splashed and danced before me, alone, getting smaller and smaller until he disappeared under the black water and all that was left was the moon.

They didn’t find Oscar’s body for two days. I remember watching his parents at the funeral, his mother weeping silently and his father sitting stone faced, staring straight ahead, not betraying any emotion. Needless to say, things changed after that. It was the beginning of the end for many of us. Anya took Oscar’s death the hardest, moving on to harder drugs and eventually fading away as just another warped memory. I think she blamed herself. It was her dare, afterall. But deep down, I always knew the truth. I was the one who had frozen. I was the one who let him go in alone. I was the one who had abandoned him. And I was the one who watched him die.

I spent most of the following year at home alone. I withdrew from my family – not that they tried to help much. They were happy enough to believe I was fine. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t sleep without the TV on, because as soon as I was alone in the dark with nothing but my thoughts, all I could see was Oscar’s face. That look in his eyes – my last memory of him – it made me sick with guilt. He trusted me and he loved me and I let him down. And now he was dead.

It wasn’t long after that the nightmares began. I remember the first time it happened. I was lying awake in my bed – I was sure I was awake – when I became aware of a faint clicking sound. My body tensed and became frozen. The clicking got louder and closer as the features of my room fell away and the familiar shadows melted into a black, formless void around my bed.

There he was. Standing before me, pale and dripping wet, hair matted to his forehead. Long, skinny arms wrapped around his shivering naked body. His face looked scared and confused, almost panicked. But his eyes were no longer the soft, curious baby blue that had once brought me so much comfort. They were a dead milky white and sunken back into his head. Staring directly into mine.

“C-c–c-” he whispered through his violently chattering teeth, “Cold. I’m so cold. Stevie, he-he-help me. I-I’m so c-c-cold. P-p-p-p-please… he-he-help me…”

I tried to scream but only choked. I was helplessly paralyzed as he stood at the foot of my bed in bewildered despair, desperate, shivering, begging me for help.

Gradually, his face started to change. His confusion and fear slowly transformed, as if he was remembering something. “H-h-how could you leave me? H-h-how… You were my f-f-f-friend,” Oscar’s expression turned to hurt. To disbelief. “You left me… you…” He paused. For a moment, there was silence.

“YOU LEFT ME.” he screamed and shot forward onto my bed, crawling towards me, chattering teeth louder and louder as he clawed forward until they were jackhammers pounding in my chest. “YOU LEFT ME. YOU LEFT ME. YOU LEFT ME.” He was on top of me as I layed completely immobilized, face inches from mine, crawling with spidery purple veins and soaking my bed as ice cold water dripped from his twisted, writhing body, choking me with the smell of brine. “HOW COULD YOU LEAVE ME!”

And he was gone. My room was back. I jumped out of bed to turn on the lights. I could still smell saltwater in the air. But I was alone.

These nightmares continued for years. They were always the same. First, the chattering of teeth and the smell of seawater would signify a visit. The room would fall away into blackness and there he was, shivering at the foot of my bed. Pleas for help. Confusion. Desperation. Then a slow realization. Betrayal. Hurt. And finally rage. I stopped sleeping. Stopped turning my light off. Kept my door open. And sometimes I would go weeks or even months without seeing him. But inevitably, the nightmares would return.

The first time I told anyone about this was in college. Half a decade of poor sleep had fried my nerves and I ended up visiting the University’s mental health counselor for support. He was the first person to tell me about sleep paralysis. Apparently it's a fairly common phenomenon. The sufferer will be awake but they won’t be able to move. This is because their body has entered REM sleep and their muscles have shut off before their brain has, causing mental consciousness with physical paralysis. Oftentimes these episodes are accompanied by a feeling of panic or dread, and, strangely, it is not uncommon for people with sleep paralysis to see what they believe to be a dark figure or malevolent presence above them. The technical term for this is a “hypnagogic hallucination.” That, in conjunction with the PTSD and survivors guilt of watching my friend drown in front of me, led to my specific, reoccuring experience of this condition. With medication and dedicated therapy, he said, we would be able to treat the symptoms while addressing the underlying causes.

And it worked. Gradually, I got better. I started taking meds and finally, for the first time, opening up about what had happened and how it affected me. I was able to let go and forgive my thirteen-year-old self for my inaction that night. And most importantly I began to sleep.

Life went on. I graduated college, found a career, met a girl. Cindy. She balanced out my restlessness and overthinking with a soft tranquility. She was nothing like me and it was exactly what I needed. I lived quietly and happily.

One weekend, Cindy had to leave town to visit family and asked if I could watch her dog while she was away. She had her own apartment in the outer Sunset. A quiet weekend alone sounded nice.

It was already past ten when I took her dog out for his walk that night. I had a windbreaker over a hoodie, but the wind was strong and I was chilled through as soon as we stepped out onto the street. We walked down Noriega and past the Great Highway and before I knew it we were at Ocean Beach.

It hadn’t even crossed my mind. But I hadn’t set foot on that sand in over ten years. Since the night Oscar died. And here I was, descending the concrete steps past the sea wall, moving almost automatically into the darkness. The waves turned over in the distance and the moon hung low in the sky, faint behind the gray mist above the water. I stared out at that lonely moon and felt comfort, proud of how far I had come.

I was snapped out of my head when Cindy’s dog suddenly bolted, barking into the darkness. “Shit,” I muttered, and took off after him, calling his name. I ran as fast as I could following the sound of his barks as they moved towards the water ahead of me. As I approached the surf, the smell of saltwater hit me and I froze. There he was, standing before me, knee deep in black water. Pale and dripping wet, hair matted to his forehead. Long, skinny arms wrapped around his shivering naked body. Teeth chattering. Eyes white.

My body locked up and I couldn’t move. Paralyzed again. The beach fell away into blackness. The dog’s bark trailed off into silence. All I could hear was that awful clicking sound of Oscar’s chattering teeth as they gnashed together behind his blue lips. He walked towards me, trembling, milky eyes locked on mine. Approached me. Stood face to face. Leaned over. Whispered in my ear.

“You left me.”

The next thing I knew I was thrashing wildly in the icy waves, gasping for breath, fighting with bewildered desperation to keep my head above water but something was pulling me under, down, down into the inky murk and I swallowed and gagged on sea water as I tried to scream and fight for air but the water was so cold, I felt my arteries constrict and my lungs tighten up and everything was black and violent and bewildering and I felt thin fingers on my throat squeezing tighter and tighter until I finally broke free and found the sand under my feet and I clawed through the sea away from the moon and towards the land until finally, finally I collapsed panting on the beach, Cindy's dog crying and licking the salt from my face and the blood from my neck. I winced in pain as I felt the pulsating scratches and I looked back towards the deserted surf, calm and lonely and beautiful.