Friday, September 6: A story about a time you were very afraid.
I am often afraid. I am afraid of driving. I am afraid of burglars. I am afraid of abductions in parking lots and of creepy crawly things and of failure and of heights and of the dark and of germs. I am so afraid of the horror genre in general that I get almost queasy-upset when I accidentally see horror movie covers. It's pretty bad. I think I have become more afraid of things since I've become an adult than when I was a child. I don't think that I was overly scared of spiders, snakes, or large insects as a kid. Now the thought of cockroaches makes my skin crawl. Ugh! But enough about that. Let me tell you about the moment when I was more scared than I had ever been in my life.
I was probably 12 or 13 at the time. My sister, my best friend, and I thought it would be cool to sleep in the camper that we had parked in the back yard. Now, when I say yard, I mean that this camper was parked on the far end of our three acre lot, furthest from the house and close to the large woods owned by my neighbor. I don't even know why we had that camper. I don't think we owned it. It's like someone had asked us to park it there, a friend or relative, until they could pick it up. No one ever used it, so it's not like it was a camper meth lab a la Breaking Bad... It was just there. And so we thought it would be cool to sleep there one night.
The camper had no power, no working toilet, no niceties at all. It was just somewhere different to sleep and we could be loud and obnoxious with our girl talk without waking my mom, stepdad, and brother. So out we went and caused quite the ruckus. I remember vividly that I was at one end of the camper on a couch thing, and I think Julianna (my sister) was on the floor and my best gal pal Alicia was on the other end of the camper. We were laughing about crushes and I am almost certain that we were making fun of the newest Backstreet Boys song when the camper started to shake.
I stopped moving. I stopped breathing.
I was certain I was about to die. Surely some hook-handed, glass eyed, serial killer had heard the girlish giggles and followed his ears to our pow-wow, intent on our doom. I had never felt so tensely terrified in my entire life. And that includes all of the times that I had gone against my better judgment and watched Are You Afraid of the Dark? (Yes, yes I was afraid of the dark. I'm still not crazy about it).
The camper continued shaking for several petrifying minutes. Julianna, Alicia, and I shivered in silence, until I heard Alicia calmly call out, "Hi!"
What in God's name did she mean by it?!?! I was nearly wetting myself with fright and she was greeting our killer like a friend?! It was more than I could handle. I may have blacked out there for a moment because the next thing I knew, my mom, stepdad, and brother were clambering into the camper, laughing all the way. I was relieved but very angry. My sister claimed she had not been afraid for our lives, but thought maybe a deer or something was humping the camper. (Really? What a weirdo!) Alicia said she had seen my stepdad's characteristically messy hair silhouetted through the window. I alone had been scared out of my wits.
I think that is actually pretty typical.
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