Dark in Meat Suit

Let’s start with my first memory…the shadow man or as my son would call him later “pointy head man”.
Had I been older and wiser I would have known this family was cursed .
I vaguely remember him standing behind my grandfather as I peeped through the bars of the wooden cage that parents keep their infants in…crib or old fashioned playpen…I don’t know which.
I felt him first,that is what caused me to look up at that very moment so he could formally introduce himself.
From that moment on he was an important and primary part of my childhood, the effects lasting until present day.
I would never sleep in the dark again and I would not sleep well for the next 40 years.
As I graduated from crib to big kid bed I would lay awake as long as I could manage ,night after night,watching him pace back and forth down the hall,stop at my bedroom door just long enough to let me hear him breathing.
I never told anyone until adult hood ,when all that earned was the response Is been afraid of all those years..I must be crazy or it must have been something I saw on TV that caused my imagination to over amp.
I knew it was real.
He never tried to hurt me but that could be because I never allowed myself to be alone in total darkness. ..except that one time.
I must have been about 3 or 4. My grandmother tucked me in,we said the Lords prayer and off went the light…sleep tight,don’t let the bedbugs bite.
The very second she closed my bedroom door I heard footsteps coming straight fir me and then I heard low breathing directly in my right ear.
Needless to say, I was out of bed calling my grandmother in a matter of seconds.
That was the last time I have seen total darkness.