Fears

I remember long nights as a child, where I stayed up long past the time I should have, as fear accrued its hold on me. This was after I moved from the shared room, with its vast blue carpet that reminded my older brother and I of a drowning sea, to the single that overlooked our yard. My bed then was the sort with draws underneath instead of a vast open space that children so often equate with a monsters den, but instead of elevating my fears about such imaginings it exacerbated them. I remember many nights when the moonlight that crept in through half closed blinds painted horrific images on the carpeted floor. The wind would not always howl and batter the siding of the house, but when it did I remember keeping my head beneath the covers, and to keep the impending apocalypse at bay.

            Of course, I am somewhat overstating things. I certainly didn’t spend every night of childhood in a state of epileptic fear; it’s just that these memories stand out for me because they were the aberration. Certainly it didn’t scar me for life, as I no longer believe such nonsense, for it was a specter of childhood when fear is usually an abstraction of itself. My fears now however are no more meaningful, really, than those that haunted the evenings of my youth. I worry about grades, because I worry about getting a job, am anxious in social situations because if I don’t make friends in college it seems I’ll be unable to a) network and b) will be set adrift in that vast sea of social connections. I fear someone finding out that I’ve not only read, but memorized large portions of “Jefty is Five” although that’s mainly because “Jefty is Five” sounds…terribly (it’s not though,  actually it’s the best short story ever…that won the Hugo award).