when i was a little girl, my greatest fear was of my hyper-awareness. of course i thought the fear was actually its manifestations, both of which had to with darkness.

first, alone in lightless rooms. i felt sensations which are indescribable to this day...sensations that i was not alone at all. i felt energies and strange frequencies, brushes of movement in the still air. after many frightening spells, i realized that if i slept on my stomach and with my night light on, i could escape these sensations for the most part. and so i did; i slept for years face-down in half-lit rooms.

the second manifestation had to do with falling asleep. i was loathe to be the last one awake, for no matter what position i took in the presence of others, the fear emerged in me. i would desperately try to talk and communicate with others to keep them awake, nearly always losing the battle to their snores or arrested responses. at birthday sleepovers in elementary school, cinched tightly into my plaid, flannel-lined sleeping bag; in hotel rooms, sharing the bed with my brother on family vacations; at summer girl scout camps in Lysol-scented air...i always felt the night world waiting menacingly for everyone else's awareness to dull so that it could speak directly to me.

this fear hasn't fully disappeared as i've aged. part of it floated away; i now easily sleep on my back in utter darkness. but part of that fear still occupies space in my soul, its manifestation metamorphosed.

i no longer fear what the night creatures might do with my attentions, but what the folds in time will do. i fear i will be left behind friends and lovers in a whirlpool of observations and feelings and preparations that i am compelled to arrange and classify in the museum of my psyche. it is not possible to live fully and vivaciously and aptly organize this all at the same time, so i spend a great deal of time recounting memories and summoning feelings...traveling back through the wrinkles in time to record what i was unable to capture during moments so that i may file experiences into their correct folder: an experience in pain, an experience in love, an experience in learning that love sometimes is pain. my brain has skillfully adapted to this hunger for detail, however, and in addition to sliding back into the past, it wanders into my future, creating expectations of events to come like a Mad Lib outline, leaving spaces for me to fill in the blanks with validity: moving in with my lover; an outdoor wedding with mason jars of wine and twinkling white lights...when these frameworks become useless; when the direction of life steers not where my mind anticipated it would, i am left with these skeletons; heavy and incomplete dreams that i find difficult to clear away.

life, then, for me, is not just the line of the present moment. but parallel lines of past and future experiences which concurrently transpire; experiences that my mind, without warning, ventures into...a vivid memory of a first kiss; legs locked together under heavy covers two winters ago; the smell of wood burning on the fire of the house where i'll live someday; the softness of my child's hair as she sits on my lap on her third birthday, blowing out her little candles...

this fear awakens briskly at times, thrashing and flailing, forcing me to take notice. the fear masons in my soul go on overtime and pump out mass after mass of fear. thick, dark, black, gooey. how i wish i could turn it off! stop my journeying into pasts that have been forgotten by all others and futures which will never happen. stop noticing so much and feeling so much; how i wish i could escape feeling so alone in my own mind.

...the only thing that helps, and it did tonight, is to write it. record it. say it. expel it. i've learned that fear dislikes fresh air. when it leaves my mouth or percusses out my fingertips onto keyboards or typewriter keys, it evaporates, runs away. so on nights like tonight, i type quickly. i shed tears. i argue with the pains that visit me. i breathe out, out, out...clearing space within, life supporting space....