There have been many times in my life when I have felt scared. Not just nervous or worried. Not an everyday kind of fear. I mean that heart racing, sick to your stomach kind of fear. That “But I don’t want to go to bed, the man with no eyes is waiting for me in the closet!” kind of fear that you feel when you’re too young to know that the real dangers, the real things to fear, are outside. Yesterday I heard a news story about a boy who was shot. Some kind of gang crime gone wrong. How can you not be scared in a world like that? Then there’s the fact that, even if you do manage to avoid real danger, there’s always that snarling black dog in your mind ready to rip you to shreds the second you step a toe out of place, or someone looks at you the wrong way, because it’s not just the monsters outside, but the ones inside too. The most nefarious of all. Harder to pin down. Harder to fight. Harder to run from. Their diaphanous impenetrability rendering them inescapable.

With the years, the insidious unrelenting vines of fear have wound their way further and further into my mind. I guess ultimately I was right be afraid of the man with no eyes, but he was never in my closet. He was in me.