We say we are afraid of gargantuan monsters, huge beasts. That’s nothing. We can take ‘em down easy, baby.
What you’re really afraid of are the things you can’t see. The little critters. Cockroaches. Rats. The jeepers-creepers that hide under the bed. The monsters you don’t understand. The little feelings that work their way and mess up the wiring in your head, picking just the right wire to nibble on and break and no, you never see it coming. If you do, you never pick up on the timing.
If you think about it, think about it really hard, that’s what you’re afraid of. The things that creep up on you and make you go haywire.
Sometimes you die and it never happens.
I’ve died many times waiting for it. This is my twenty-third. The last time, I tied a belt around my neck and tied the other end to the knob and kicked the door hard. I watched my body being wheeled out from my rented quarters into an ambulance two hours later. Springy neck, it looked like. But how I breathed. Even did a cartwheel; too bad no one could see it.
But every time – every time – something always knocks me unconscious. It happens.
And then I wake up in a room with white walls and nothing else but me. I go outside. I go back home. Nothing’s changed. Every time.
