When your social media sleeps…

So tell me, Loyal Audience, do you fear? When the Facebook page is asleep for the night and all the pretty, happy photos are dormant for eight hours, do you fear? When your Twitter is silent and the tweeting bird’s cage is covered for the night, do you fear? When your cell phone is charging on the nightstand next to your bed and you have somehow managed to tear yourself away from its buzz and brrrrrriiing! and  its endless “dog-whistling” that calls us all back and back to it to check for that “Like” or that “Emoji” that instantly causes the physiological reaction of oxytocin secretion in the brain, do you fear? Yes, oxytocin, the “feel good” hormone! Do you fear…and if you do , what do you fear? Okay, I’ll get it started. I don’t think we grow out of some of the fears we had as children. Would it surprise you to know I am terrified of death and that, to this day, I avoid funerals whenever possible because of this. It has caused a few rifts here and there with people I know and care for who had lost loved ones and could not understand how it was I could be so disrespectful as to stay away. It was not out disrespect, but rather out of self-preservation, I guess. I am getting better with this, though! I am trying! When I was 12-years old and attended a distant cousin’s funeral, I made the mistake of peering down into the hole and I could have sworn I saw what looked like a door in the side of grave at the bottom. A door, for God’s sake! Door. To. Where? That night, I kept waking up and each time I saw a long white casket arranged at the foot of my bed. Glowing in the dark of my bedroom. I had to rub the sleep out of my eyes to banish it from my sight. But over and over, my twelve-year-old self could not find the relief of sleep nor a respite from the remnants of an especially haunting funeral experience. I carry that with me, that dark memory and yes, I do fear. That is why I write so religiously about the very things that frighten me. It’s therapeutic, you know? I have yet to write about my second biggest fear as a kid, but it’s coming. I was terrified of being kidnapped as a child. Taken away from my family by a stranger in a red car, blue car, silver car, insert color of car here_________. In elementary school, we used to bring home papers to our parents warning them about someone in a (fill in color of car here__________)car who was roving the local neighborhoods and had actually “tried to pull a classmate into his car”. For me, I remember the “man in the red car” and I feared every red car my mother or father drove past on the way to the market or to school. Wherever! Silly, really? Or is it? I will tell you this, I still shudder whenever I drive by a red car and my overactive imagination kicks into high-gear. I imagine the interior of the car: back seat upholstery stiff with something not quite red and not quite gray, tinted windows, driver’s side window vented an inch to let the faceless driver’s cigarette smoke slip out of the opening, and of course the smell of copper and smoke and B.O. and the sweat of the child that had come before. Or…the children. How could I not be afraid? So, in closing, I have no choice but to often fear my own imagination because there are times when it messes with me. It takes hold of me and it sinks its claws into my brain and it won’t let go until I write down what it is passing along to me. So, I do fear. Call it weak? Call it wussy? Call it whatever you want, but you must admit it is human and primal and it belongs to all of us.