Oh, dear, you look frightful.

I'm afraid of a lot of things. Spiders, murderers, space heaters. I'm afraid of never living up to my potential. Fear crawls up my legs and eats at my heart whenever I feel incompetent or whenever there is a possibility that a boy could like me. I'm especially afraid of those boys.

I'm afraid that I'll marry an abuser. And I'm afraid that I won't want to leave him and he'll kill me.

I'm scared that if I write this post tonight, then nobody will read anything else I've written and they'll be stuck with this dirty washrag.

I'm most frightened of words.

Words that bite and words that melt your confidence like acid. Words that encourage falsely with an air of sarcasm that tears and rips.

Words like 

Crawl,

Stalk,

and Hate.

Rejection,

Dismissal,

Elimination,

Failure.

I'm afraid of words like Love and Forever and Infinite.
I'm especially afraid of infinite.

"Your dad is dead"

"We can't buy groceries"

"I'm leaving you"

Words, words, words, haunting, deteriorating, eating at my conscience and feeding my creativity all at once. I'm afraid that I'll someday have so many words I won't be able to use them all, and I'm afraid that I'll forget all my words and I'll lose the connection that the syllables create between me and my parents, me and my friends, me and myself. 

{I'm afraid of dark words--like unforeseeable and like black and placid. (Especially placid because of what comes after the placid.)}

Dark words like sex and like the b and the f and the h and the lmnopqrs swear words. I'm afraid of the power that they give and the authority that they bestow.  I'm scared to use them but I'm scared that if I don't then I can't be good, I can't hold that power, I can't captivate an audience. Without them your sentences simply can't be daring, or creative, or "deep". I'm scared of people who use them and I'm subject to their power. I'm not preaching to anyone, but I'm just saying that you frighten me.

Frankly, 

It's quite terrifying.

 Boys, belly buttons, toe fungus, optimists, Nazis, gingers, chili peppers, eight year old children, long fingernails, losing my eyelashes, car accidents, bald people, falling, falling and not having someone to catch me, french horns, mannequins, canned food, earthquakes, dinosaurs, (really dinosaurs), scary movies, mirrors, big spoons, dependency, hammers, spiders, bugs, knives, Attila the Hun, murderers, karate classes, sour cream. Death of people, life, eternity, kids that never blink, spilling nail polish on tables, driving on the wrong side of the road, not getting accepted to college, being poor, spending all my money on food, having kids, being pregnant, getting an epidural, etc etc, other baby-having related things.

Hey, I know, I'm a Pansy.

{Alice}