Jill Valentine trips through the graveyard pressing the wound near her stomach, Christ-like, and I wish it happened to me. I wish the mutant that looks like old roses could have sunk his coffee ground bones into me, so that I could bleed and have a reason to feel sick. 

The truth is, I'm fine, and I remember to take my medicine. I live in a warm apartment built in the 19th century, so the plaster ceiling is still decorated in thick, music note swirls like a fresh wedding cake. I make my money, and I spend it on stupid things — pumpkin cookies and Shirley Temples. Everything is all right, and my cat wraps his fuzzy tail around my hand like he's holding it. But the dark hallway…

Jill's giant shadow paradoxically only makes her look more vulnerable. In this mansion, with a thunderstorm out the window and hunting dogs by the door, shadows don't let nice girls like Jill moonlight as the Boogeyman. 

She's too small for the ceilings, too soft against the paintings with sharp, cadmium red chips scabbing off. Everything is encased in mahogany wood, like I'm looking from inside a casket, and I can't breathe. 

Resident Evil's fixed perspectives are overwhelming. When Jill turns a corner and reveals a gentle candelabra flame, I feel my face get hot. She walks straight ahead on plush Turkish carpet and suddenly finds a body slumped in the corner, fresh blood speckling his cheeks like glitter. 

Now I hold my breath on purpose, until my chest hurts. To know what it's like. 

Is it unacceptable to want pain? Literary scholars sometimes criticize Sylvia Plath for her melodrama. They say it's historically offensive – commanding fathers and husbands are Nazi officers to her since, "Every woman adores a Fascist," she writes in "Daddy." "The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you." 

The pain she feels is equal or greater to that of a skinny baby in a death camp, "In the German tongue, in the Polish town / Scraped flat by the roller / Of wars, wars, wars."

I felt embarrassed when my high school teacher told me this — that Sylvia comparing her suburban dissatisfaction to the actual Holocaust was thought to be wrong. When I read "Daddy" for the first time, I thought I'd finally found a woman who understood me. 

But I'm not shy about it anymore. I'm certain my house is the biohazardous Resident Evil mansion. 

When I go toward my bedroom on the left, I'm overcome with anxiety, loneliness, this nervous twitch I've had for years — death. When I turn right, toward the bathroom mirror, I face death: there is something inherently odd about me, and I've never felt comfortable around anyone. 

I assert my position as Lady of the Haunted House by slouching, looking at the black phone glued to my hand. This is also death. There's a video of a man and woman getting hit by a train on Instagram. A Twitter post asks me to adopt a dog being euthanized today. If I look long enough, I'm sure my flesh will rot and turn blackberry and pink with earthworms. Everyone can smell it. 

I let it bother me. I feel the pressure of a strange angle in Resident Evil. It reveals wine spilled across the dinner table like blood, human grape juice. 

It's also uncanny seeing Jill’s reflection in a warbled window glass as the rain continues to beat down outside, trapping her in an aquarium. I'd be scared to death, if I were her. I never really outgrew my childhood fear of my own reflection. 

It was Bloody Mary's fault. I couldn't let her red name pass my peony lips. But I'd always worry that maybe I had performed the ritual in my sleep, or subconsciously, and I kept waiting for my mirror image to move when I wasn't moving, to sneer at me or say "fuck." 

Even parts of me don't feel like they're a part of me. 

I bury it in fertilizer, and Milton always has the right idea: "These pleasures, Melancholy, give, / And I with thee will choose to live." 

I brew some kind of cinnamon tea in the middle of exploring Jill's and my house. The basement is at the bottom of my teapot, where there's curiosity and mildew. If I can't escape pain, then I will enjoy it.

But even though I abide by this ethos, I still make Jill hurry as I notice a man-shaped shadow. There are arms stretching all over her armored body — it's the mutant on the other side of the room. In the silhouette of his embrace, Jill becomes part-him. She's shrouded in something wrong, and I'm getting nervous again. 

As if hearing my thoughts, Resident Evil guides me toward another black hallway. Pain. Death. Mutants keep tearing into Jill's neck like she's made of bread, so now she's bleeding from God's body and all out of bullets. 

I moved across New York to live in my 19th century apartment, with pink stained glass in the living room, and yet I keep getting that feeling. I'm half-dead in a haunted house, and I belong nowhere. 

Or perhaps my lips are frostbitten, and that's why I never wanted to confront my reflection. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary…

I'm a Jill O'Lantern – something dangerous glows inside. 

But although Jill can't find Chris Redfield, and Barry insists on splitting up, she keeps her beret perfectly snug atop her fresh, French bob. When a deranged dog comes to gnaw on her arm a bit, she doesn't get dirty. She's silent. When her health bar turns a flammable color and pronounces "Danger," her expression is relaxed. Maybe mildly constipated. Her soul is out of her chest and splat on the ceiling. 

Mine, too. I can be chill. I can brush my hair before starting my day and having incessant thoughts of death. 

It's almost awkward, the way Death accompanies me. He enters my carriage, as he did for Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson.

"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," Dickinson writes, "And Mourners to and fro / Kept treading - treading - till it seemed / That Sense was breaking through -"

But relief is brief. Death, you know, is forever. He watches as I vacuum the floor and pour cream into the saucepan. He's quiet, always respectful. In another part of the world, there are entire families whose legs are getting torn off from the rest of them, because I paid for bombs with my tax dollars. 

There is nothing quite so serious going on inside my nice house. Jill finds a way into a secret garden, and I am on my comfortable couch slouching like a zombie over hot brains. Later, I'll dot my face with mulberry-colored blush, go outside and say thank you to the cashier who sells me a Basque cheesecake, or something like that. 

Nothing serious. No one cries. But I have these thoughts. I daydream of death by zombies, dipped in shadow like a chocolate strawberry, shuffling across the Turkish rug in one of Resident Evil's long, dark hallways…