Be Still My Heart, Please.

There's a noice somewhere in the house. Instant alert. I tense up and my heart goes on a rampage. It is night time. In the darkness is the unknown.

But it doesn't stop there. My mind has to assault me with horrid images of death and violence. Faceless intruders out to do me harm. Why? I don't know. Waking nightmares pollute my consciousness. My nerves are nervous.

It's not the scary movies that does it. I'm a major skeptic of most of them and I'm never the jumpy sort. I've learned to see when it's coming. I can scare a friend in the theater right before the instant the something jumps out at the screen.

I can't do that in real life. I can't reach out inside my head and grab myself moments before the imagined horror grabs me. I imagine that if I imagine too hard it becomes real. I feel like somebody is watching me. From the darkness beyond the window. I can only see the reflection of the room I'm in. Nothing past that. I imagine a face emerging from the darnkness beyond. A face pressed to the glass. That would be too much. Next I imagine seeing the reflection of the room I'm in. Seeing movement in the reflection of the room I'm in somewhere behind me. In the reflection of the glass. Sounds. I cannot reassure myself safety.

What has caused this paranoia? I have friends who live pleasantly alone. I feel scared for them. It must be the news I tell myself. I've come to the age of ripe womanhood. Fresh meat for hungry wolves. On the news all week long stories of murder and violence saturate my eyes. I watch these learning channel forensic shows that solve murder scenes with the tiniest evidence. America's Most Wanted and their list of evil men.

The night used to be mine. Before I knew what death I could face. Perhaps it was my invincibility as a teen that drove me out at the wee hours of the night to wander the streets of my neighborhood, the fields beyond that, the parks and empty playgrounds. A young girl out wandering the nights in the cold. I would escape through my window. It would be a mystery were I to have disapeared one night. I thought nothing of what-if's then.

I've lost that now. My what-if's are made real through reenactments on tv. The stories in the news. The crazy man hollering at me as I walk from my car one night into the local Walgreens. My imagination dragging me down dark alleys being raped, mugged,stabbed, strangled, and shot.

But when daylight comes, I feel slighly better.

old junk ...new junk