Barophobia- the fear of gravity

It’s a funny thing, last night I cried because as I wanted to remember what it was like to be held by the one person I’m supposed to love, all I could remember was kissing you, your fingers laced through mine. It felt like a huge injustice, like I was being cheated of the happy memories I was supposed to have.

I got lost in the night, in the drinks, in the lights and smoke. I let it wash over me, dull all my senses. All I did was run from you because I couldn’t deal with the thought of a life devoid of you. I knew we ended for many reasons, but the lights were too bright and the music was too loud and I couldn’t think of a single one.

And then, this morning I woke up and I felt…okay. Maybe I won’t drink so much because there isn’t so much pain to numb, maybe I won’t run from remembering because it doesn’t hurt so much to remember. Maybe you have to let yourself hurt before you let yourself heal.

I guess I’m okay without you, I can live. I don’t need you to complete me anymore. I’m not a 5^th grade art project, I am not a 1000 piece puzzle missing a piece, I am not yours, I belong to no one but myself.

Or perhaps there is an empty space between hurting and being okay, and I've merely stumbled blindly into it. But for the first time in a long time, my whole body doesn’t ache with I think of you. Maybe I've fallen into the gap, but I think I’ll stay a while.

Cardiophobia- the fear of the heart

Maybe I have some kind of obsession with fixing things; with finding someone that has convinced themselves that they will never love again, and then repairing what others broke.

I hold his heart in my hands and gently begin to fill the cracks, trancing them over with my thumb, like a potter, intently smoothing over wet clay. I trace over the scars the one before me left, and I know he will be okay. He will love like the first time again.

In the back of my mind I remember all the days I tried to make you smile, all the nights I stayed up telling you things I will never trust anyone with again. I like repairing broken things, I always have. I like fixing people, making them feeling like it’s going to be okay. But what I am only staring to realize is, I filled your cracks with parts of myself, the life I poured into you was my own. With every person I fix, I am left more broken. For all I gave you, I am less.

All the same, I continue to fix. Maybe someday I will cease to exist at all, only I will never cease to exist because I exist in every broken heart I touched, and what could be better than that?

Thanatophobia - the fear of dying

I was dying quietly, I was on fire and I stood and burned with my eyes closed and not so much as a tremble of my bottom lip.

But now, now I am dying loudly. I combust in a series of loud explosions, I scream in agony, fireworks burst from my fingertip, I got up in a spray of golden sparks.

Perhaps I have forgotten how to bare my pain silently, gracefully. Or perhaps this is more pain than any one body was meant to bare.

It is a wonder that no one can see the madness in my eyes, it is a wonder that no one has yet drowned in my blood.

I've regressed, all the steps I took forward lay in front of me. It’s unbearable, do you understand? It is unbearable. I hate you for being okay, for living your life, for carrying on without me. I hope you miss me, I hope you wake up sometimes at night and feel as if a cold knife has been driven through your heart, I hope you see the sunset and your hands burn at the memory at holding mine. It is only just that you feel like that, because I do. I do.

I itch to call you, to tell you that everything that mattered to me before is gone, to ask you to come back because you were the centre of my universe and without you I float aimless, a lost planet.

I’m dying loudly, my breath is the creaking of a rusted door, by heartbeat is the clash of cymbals. I've forgotten how to be soundless, I've forgotten how to be poised. I spill over with black smoke and I cry shamelessly as the flames engulf me.

Nostophobia- the fear of returning home

The lights rush by way too fast, everything is a blur of skyscrapers and night air and adrenaline. The skyline is reflected in the river and I feel a part of that reflection, I almost have substance, but I do not fully exist.

The air whips my hair back and I look upwards, and although we are moving so fast, the sky looks as if it is not moving at all. We are travelling but we are still.

I close my eyes and stretch my arms skywards, I laugh but the sound is lost in the air roaring around me. I am both nothing and everything. We fly by palm trees, couples kissing on benches, more water, and still more light. I will always remember, but I have already forgotten.

The city buildings look unimaginably high, the streets look unbelievably alive and I am one speck, one tread in the fabric. The air is whistling tunes in my ear and I am both here and everywhere.

I fill my lungs with air and I swear there is nothing sweeter in the world than the air here. I allow myself to get dazzled by the lights until it is a haze of gold and blue and red, the music is way too loud and I mouth the words by heart. This may be the end, but it only the beginning.

Nephophobia- the fear of clouds

Building a cloud

Clouds have come to be associated with darkness, the foretelling of wind and rain. Writers use the pathetic fallacy to foreshadow fear and pessimism with the coming of rain clouds.

When I think of clouds, however, I think of the day I came home, on a plane, looking down on a blanket of fluffy clouds, turned pink by the setting sun. The sky was violet and I felt I could almost step out onto them and walk, feeling only cotton between by toes.

Berndnaut Smilde created his ‘Nimbus’ exhibit not based on the eerie chill clouds bring in the late evening, but on the simple whimsy of a solitary cloud in a faultless blue sky, a work of art so breathtakingly beautiful.

Today I told him that I would like a cloud, a cloud in my apartment. Maybe because I like the imperfect outline it brings, a jagged softness, or maybe I want to have a moment of happiness, the wisps of another time, floating in my sitting room.

I want my own Nimbus.

‘I will build you a cloud,’ he says, ‘and I will make it pink because I know pink makes you happy. But I will make it in a bottle, so that where ever you go, you can take the cloud.’

I think of suitcases spilling over with clothes, and on top of the mess, my cloud in a bottle. I think of setting it on my bedside table where ever I go. When I am sad I will hold it in my hands and remember a day when everything was right in the world and I was a lot happier than I am tonight.

Isolophobia- the fear of solitude

Repairing what is damaged is considered noble. What no one ever tells you is that when you take someone broken and fix them, spill your own life into them, you make them whole again. What is terrifying about this is, that by loving them so much you become dependent on them. And in that same act of loving them, you make them well enough to walk away from you.

Potamophobia- The fear of rivers

Inside I am all a blur. They say the best writing is done on a broken heart, but my heart is too broken for my mind to fathom thoughts.

I want to tell you that I love you, that I will paint you a hundred million sunsets. I will pour over ten thousand pages of poetry and highlight every word that reminds me of the colour of your eyes in the sunlight. Let me be relentless in my love for you, let me wear you away like an unyielding river.  Your name is spelt out in every heartbreaking guitar chord I hear.

I feel broken again and again and again.

Something burns white hot in my core, it’s scorching me from the inside out. You have hollowed out my eyes. I want to take your hand and put it over my heart and ask you if you feel me dying. Do you feel me dying? From across a sea, do you feel my breathing slowing? Do you feel me giving up?

You were supposed to love me. And I was supposed to love you. What a letdown love is.

Rivers are flowing from my wrists, from my eyes, from my heart, a billion rivers. How much can a heart endure, I wonder, before the weight of remembering crushes it? Maybe you will forget how my fingers felt when they were laced through yours, maybe you will forget the taste of my lips.

Close your eyes. Do you feel me dying?

Decidophobia- the fear of making decisions

Part 1

The room is almost filled by the long table that stretches from end to end. Atop is a white linen tablecloth embroidered with silver snowflakes that glitter when the light catches them. The table is laden with shining white plates set for each person and glimmering crystal glasses in every shape, from wine to water. Silver cutlery is neatly lined up, salad fork, dinner fork, cake fork, dessert spoon, dinner knife, teaspoon, soup spoon, all proudly displaying the initials of the hostess in a curling Edwardian script. The centre of the table holds what looks like a hundred crystal candle stands with tall silver candles elegantly rising skyward like sentinels. Between them, small glass cubes sprout dozens of creamy white roses, a gem glowing in the centre of each flower.

Behind the table is a brick wall featuring huge windows that rise arching, like those of an ancient cathedral, from white marble floor to ceiling. There are no drapes, the only background is the snow falling outside. The room should be cold, but is only pleasantly cool.

Inside too it appears that snow is falling. The ceiling above drips with strings of clear gems, pearls and tiny paper globes in white and silver. Four chandeliers in different sizes hang over the table like shimmering crystal orbs, a million shining flower petals. Light bulbs hang suspended in delicate spherical cages like shining, white birds. It is a beautiful chaos of light.

Each seat is covered in a think white fur, soft to the touch and the smell of roses and lavender is only faint in the air. The table glitters, the snow outside glitters, the chandeliers glitter. The  white and silver room fills with the sound of strings and clinking of glasses as the night begins.

Part 2

The walls reflect the deep redness of oak in the gentle golden lighting. The long table is covered in a rich gold silk that matches the thick carpeting underfoot. The table is a mass of large red roses and purple carnations in both tall and short glass vases with round bases that look as though they have been dipped in spun sugar. The roses, their delicate petals fully open, spill over the edge of the vases.  Tea candles cast a warm light from tiny spun sugar holders. These cover the whole centre of the table, a riot of crimson, eggplant and burgundy and the diffusion of candle light.

Heavy bone china plates with a pattern of tiny roses around the edges and smooth, weighty cutlery are set at each place with rose petals scattered along the length of the table. From the high ceiling ornate filigree chandeliers hold frosted bulbs that give off a gentle golden glow. The ceiling is covered in elaborate inlays and cornicing, cherubs flutter between olive wreaths and fluffy clouds.  The rich scent of cinnamon fills the warm air.

The chairs are high backed, heavy, dark wood with red silken seats and backs. Everything is warm and soft as candles flicker, casting shadows on the petal strewn tablecloth. An indigo place card sits at each place with each name handwritten in gold calligraphy. The sound of laughter fills the room as people find their places. 

Clinophobia- the fear of going to bed

My love is burning itself to ashes. I am consumed. I awake begging to forget the colour of your eyes. I detest the memory of my hand in yours. Your lips have poisoned me.

You pull me like the moon pulls the tides and I am hopeless, helpless, haphazardly clinging to the shore.

It’s all I can muster to whisper, stop, in my sleep.

I tremble like a leaf in your hurricane. I will you to forget my face.

I lay like a child on my side. A mountain range is rising from my spine. You are running down my face like hot blood.

You kissed my lips as you drenched me in gasoline. Without looking back, you strike a match.

Catoptrophobia- the fear of mirrors

‘You’re just like me,’ he says. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard this. I don’t know what it is in me that makes a boy look at me and see his own reflection, not only in my eyes but in my mannerisms, in my thought process and my personality.

But then maybe that is all any of us are, a mere reflection of each other, the looking glass of the world. Maybe we are born blank canvases, clean slates, and then we go into the world and we become a cross-stitch of other people. Like a quilt, maybe we become an accumulation of the traits we admire in others. Whether it’s the way your first love crinkled her nose when she laughed, the phrase your best friend always uses, or the love of peonies of your favourite television character, we fit them together, weave them together with the strings of our own consciousness and wrap ourselves in it.

So perhaps I am a mirror lake, an echo of a million different voices. Perhaps we all are. But then what happens when you take away all the traits we’ve picked up, like children collecting seashells on the white beach? Perhaps once you take away all the good, all that is left, all that is truly ours, is the bad. The only thing that we don’t try to pick up along the way is a darkness to add to the one inside of us.

So I wait for a boy to tell me, not that I am a reflection of the best parts of himself, but that when I look in the mirror, the scars reflected back match his. I wait for him to tell me that he lays awake at night wishing he could dispel the same demons that I wrestle with. I wait for a boy that looks into my eyes and does not see the mirrored surface of the lake, but the still, icy depths.

Agateophobia- the fear of insanity.

It is too silent. A silence so loud it is everything I can do not to scream. I don’t know why I am so afraid to be alone. Maybe because when I’m alone I start to think. That little voice that I keep dormant with noise and chatter suddenly begins to speak.

Maybe it’s because that little voice starts to whisper unwanted truths into my ear. Maybe it tells me that life is passing me by, that I have not become the person I set out to be. Maybe it reminds me of failures I had forgotten. Maybe it asks me why I am still alone after all this time.

Maybe it makes me think of the disappointment in my father’s eyes. Maybe it murmurs of all the chances I was too afraid to take. Maybe it speaks of friends that turned their backs on me, loves that broke my heart, and battles that were lost.

It tells me that there are no second chances for the weak, it tells me that I can never live up to the expectations that are accumulating on my doorstep. It whispers that it is okay to surrender, the ends are not worth the means.

‘Give up,’ it hums, ‘just give up.’

Optophobia- the fear of opening one's eyes

My mother sits me down, her eyes so full of concern. She tells me that life is hard, things are always difficult, it’s an uphill battle. My heart aches as I look at her lined face and swollen eyes. I wonder how things can go so wrong, how someone can love you one day and forget your name the next. I put my cold hand on her warm one. She warns me to be careful, to guard my heart, to build walls, set defences for the heartbreak that will surely come.

For just the smallest of seconds I am afraid, I doubt myself, I distrust the way I feel so powerfully. I suddenly curse the way I love so uninhibitedly, so utterly and without reservation. I fear for the way I give my heart away without thinking twice.

She looks into my eyes and I swear she can see my fear because she smiles and gets up. I see the sadness she carries in every pore of her skin, in every beat of her heart. Before she leaves the room she tells me one last thing, the most important thing she has ever told me:

‘Nothing is ever easy…except in love. When you are in love, everything is easy.’

Melophobia - the fear of music

I wait until the rain has stopped, until the urgent knocking on the roof has subsided and the world around is silent. I press play and stand in the middle of the room, my eyes closed. 

The song begins and in those soft notes, I can almost feel the grass against my skin, I see the stars, tiny pinpoints of light in the darkness. I feel your body next to mine, the rise and fall of your chest, the promises you whispered into my ear, your fingers laced through mine, like a secret in the night.

I imagine me, in a white dress, my arms looped around your neck, your hands on my waist while these familiar words swell around us. I want to think I will look up at you and smile, I’ll whisper to you that when our children pull out our heavy photo album, I will tell them that it is the weight of my happiness that they feel. And when they trace tiny fingers over the edges of the pictures, I will tell them how that was the smile I wore on the happiest day of my life.

That night on the grass, under the stars, life was just starting, everything was light and love. I think of how things have changed, but how much I still want to live and die with you, to this song. I imagine candlelight suppers with my hand linked to yours under the table, midnight swims with our laugher filling the still night air and slow Sunday afternoons under the covers with my head on your chest.

The song ends and I stand for a moment, absorbing the reverberation from my thoughts. I try not to imagine that way your skin felt, the way your lips tasted, or the tears in your beautiful brown eyes when you said goodbye to me.

Chronophobia - the fear of time

I turn the door handle and walk inside again. 

How much more suffering do I have to bare? The excitement I felt when I left still hangs in the air like the rising waves of a mirage, shimmering, whispering.

I counted backwards for months until I felt the wheels of the airplane leave the earth, 0 days, 0 minutes, 0 seconds. 

I did my penance, I paid for my crimes. I shut that door so triumphantly, victorious over time itself. I fooled myself into thinking I would not feel the crushing loneliness again. It slowly bleeds me out, weighs down on me like a million hands, pushing down until I can't raise my head.

A chill passes through me as breathe in the emptiness, 120 days, 5 hours, 23 seconds.

See, leaving is easy, running away is easy, escaping is easy. But coming back to the mess you've left, the hearts you've broken, the echoes of your tears? 

Leaving is easy; it's coming back that kills you.

Arsonphobia- the fear of fire

Every time the dream is the same. I see emerald grass, glistening with tiny glowing orbs of freshly fallen dew. The sky is so carelessly blue, so cloudlessly ignorant. The sunlight spills in liquid gold shafts through trees, thick with India green leaves.Vines creep leisurely up the gnarled bark of the trees. They sprout fuchsia flowers as big as teacup saucers and fill the air with a sweetly intoxicating scent. Huge butterflies, heavy with brilliant blue hue wing their way through the perfumed air. They perch, poised like dancers, on the flowers.

I walk through the trees, my bare feet sinking into the soft grass until I see the lake. It reflects the trees like an indigo mirror. Suddenly I am filled with an unbearable thirst. I run towards the still waters and reach my hand into it. It is not quite cold and the water tastes not quite sweet.

I lie down in the grass next to the lake and close my eyes. I hear birds trilling in the trees, the humming of insects and I feel a gentle wind stir the grass. 

When I open my eyes everything has changed. The lake is gone, only a concave space remains, brown earth, cracked from heart, parched. I look about me, confused. The world is on fire. The trees scream as flames lick through their green hair. The air is hazy with smoke and heat. I get up and stumble as I run, my lungs burning for air. The vines have fallen away from the trees and lay in ashes on the scorched ground. The heat beats against my skins, angry, vindictive. The grass is a carpet of blackness, a field of death.

I have done this; I have set fire to this place. Tears fill my eyes as towers of blazing red and fiery orange surround me. I cry because I feel so much guilt for destroying everything, because the smoke is burning my eyes and because a blue butterfly falls from the sky and writhes on the ground at my feet, the tips of its wings ablaze.

I wake up with the tears still in my eyes.

Noctiphobia- the fear of the night

Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder.

Today I want to be a lamp. I want to find someone swallowed by darkness and I want to reach my hand out, offer them a light to see where they are, how to get out, and most importantly, I want to be the light that lets them see who they are, clearly, for the first time.

Today I want to be a lifeboat. I want to be a safe haven in the turbulent seas of life. I want to give someone a nights rest while the storm rages on, and I want to take them home, desperate and winded and exhilarated. I want to see their face as we reach the shore together.

Today I want to be a ladder. I want to help someone climb, to all the places they had never thought to reach. I want to offer them a leg up, the chance to get everything they ever wanted, to help them ascend out of the hole they have dug themselves into.

I’m going to be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder.

Maybe be because it is so dark and the waters are so deep and I can’t seem to be able to climb my way out.

Kenophobia- the fear of voids

I gather together the things that happen to me through the day, all the things that I am brimming over to share with you, and I store them away like shining copper pennies. I want to place each one of them in your open palm and see the way you smile at me and stroke my cheek with the back of your finger.

I keep them in my pocket until the sun sets, my eyes on the door handle, and then I throw them into the well and wish. I wish that tomorrow, that tomorrow you’ll be here.

Atephobia- the fear of ruin

I wake up with nostalgia hot on my bones and the memory of your kiss hot on my lips. I get up and swim through the haze. The room trembles with the remainder of the excitement I exuded as I left it all those days ago. Leaving is easy; it is coming back that burns.

The boy behind me on the bus is wearing your cologne. It makes me angry, indignant, like he is intruding on what makes you so intoxicating.  I want to turn around and tell him that he has failed, he can never be you.

Someone has trekked through wet cement, a snake of delirious footprints trails unknowingly across the sidewalk. I wonder if the scars you left on me show. Maybe they are in my pulse, in my eyes. There are minutes and miles between us but I see your name on the inside of my eyelids.

I get caught in the rain. Drops trapped in my eyelashes like city lights in the distance. All the things I once loved, that shone in a fantasy now fade to gray; I feel a light has gone out in me, somewhere unreachable.

I walk on, and on, and on. I will carry on with this intricate distraction. Isn't that all life is? A distraction? Or a high definition dream?  It is played out to sidetrack us from the fact that we are alive.

We are so alive it hurts.

Electrophobia- the fear of electricity

The rain is tapping out a love note on our windowpane but we remain safe in a cotton cocoon. I lay pressed against you, intertwined with you from knees to toes. I am awed at the singing of your skin, the whole continent of you pulsating with living electricity.

My forehead is against your chest and your hand is on my hip. Your calm breathing is gently rocking me to sleep but I am too amazed by your heartbeat to close my eyes.

The steady beating is a melody I want to live to, a symphony that I could lose myself in. I can feel its gentle nudges on my face, the throb of a river of life, the soft fingers of solid existence.

 I am filled with a wholesome wonder at this one magical organ that keeps us both alive.

Asthenophobia - the fear of weakness

My dad was never around much. He spent most of his time building a successful business, but I looked up to him so much that I hung off every word he said. It never occurred to me that words from someone that is meant to guide and love you might be bad advice. It wasn't until later years that I realized that I never did get much from him in the form of guidance or love.

One thing he would repeat continuously in the form of a life lesson: never play unless you know you can win.

So, in my younger years I would never play a game, or do a task unless I knew I could win, which wasn’t very often. I wish I had the wisdom to realize that there are so many more reasons to play life’s game.

What about playing for that look of admiration in the eyes of someone that loves you? What about playing for someone that looks to you to set them an example? What about playing to show yourself you can? What about playing to test how far you dare to push yourself? And what about playing just for the pure, undaunted love of the game? 

Atychiphobia - the fear of failure

Wouldn't it be lovely, I think, to be able to paint a picture in someone’s mind using just your words? How amazing, to take someone’s imagination like a blank canvas and paint it with brilliant hues, your brush merely the formation of letters. To show them places they have never been, fill their senses with unfamiliar scents and summon up a feeling they have never felt before. That I should live on in the printed word long after everyone that ever knew me is gone.

What I mean to say is, when I grow up, I want to be a writer. I want to write words so heavily laden with meaning that thousands of people comb through them with highlighters and markers and pencils, seeking out my train of consciousness.

No one will know that I am hiding my insecurities behind intricately worded metaphors and similes. I want to store my broken emotion behind each full stop like the hidden shelves of a forgotten cupboard.

I want to make hearts race, tears fall and gasps be uttered, just with force of my words. I want to pour myself into each sentence so that you may find me concealed in every space. I want someone to finish reading my work and pause, and think about who they are and what role they play in the torrid lives of others. And maybe after they finish pondering that, perhaps they will see my name and think: yes, she was a writer.

Gerascophobia - the fear of growing old

I stand in the dark corridor and look through the large hospital window into the nursery.  The babies are all asleep in their tiny cots. I count the rows, 11 babies in all. 11 tiny, round heads, eyes closed and crinkled at the edges. For a second I am hit by the magnitude of the moment. Before me lay 11 brand new lives, untouched, unspoilt and brand new, 11 fresh starts.

It’s 2am and I let my imagination run away with me. In this small town there is every chance that these 11 lives will become more and more intertwined in the crosswinds of life.

Baby 2 is going to be a genius, numbers and letters and formulae are going to fall into place without having to think about them. His parents with compare their other children to him, lining up his achievement awards on the mantle.

Baby 7 will grow tall and blond and popular. She will be cheer captain and homecoming queen. Then one day she will wake up only to find that she has become the image of her mother, everything she promised herself she would never be.

Baby 9 and Baby 3 will be high school sweethearts. he will ask her to marry him on a cloudless summer day when the sky is as blue as her eyes. They will fight the odds, distance and fate so that 25 years from now they can look through the very same window at their own little girl.

Baby 5 will find it harder to make friends than the others. He will hover on the outskirts, never invited to parties, sitting alone at lunch with only the whispers to keep him company. At 16 he will swallow two bottles of painkillers. He won't make it to 17.

Baby 11 will start learning to play the guitar at six. During the storm of teenage rebellion he will run away to find his own path. Instead of finding solace in the music he would often get lost in, he will find it by getting lost in the green eyes of a girl with a passion to rival his own.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

All I know is that every one of the tiny bodies before me will feel happy, and sad, they will fall in love, they will disappoint their parents, they will meet people that change them and they will make memories.

They will grow up. We all grow up 

Autophobia - the fear of being alone

You come to me with your heart bruised purple. You slide down the wall to sit on the floor next to me. I make small talk, I try to make you laugh. You're my best friend, my secrets lay like a starry galaxy on your palms. Your words lay like the imprint of rain along my spine. 

You drum your fingers on your knee and I wish I could take up your hand, take up your heart. I ask you why you don't just find a new girl, a better one. You mumble something back, but I know why. It is a girl with hair that never lays flat and a laugh that's a little too loud, a heartless girl. She still rests an icy finger on your cheek.

What a fool, I think, what a fool, to have had you, to lace her fingers into your pulse, to drown in your eyes, to feel your heartbeat on her cheek, and to let you go. How can she live without your hands on her waist? How can she breathe love into another mans ear? How can she kiss with the same lips?

I look at you. You look at me. What has she done? How could she?

What have I done? How could I? 

I can't live without you. Take me back?

Mnemophobia - the fear of memories

I yearn for past times, for days not quite long gone.

I remember golden leaves that crunch underfoot, the sky remained piercing blue, unremarkable benches under undistinguished trees.

I remember steaming coffee cups and the laughter of friends that have since forgotten their loyalty. I remember the stolen kisses from boys who have disappeared into the arms of another.  

Oh, for a time when tomorrow promised to be just as good as yesterday and there's always more time. More time to change your mind, to make up your mind, to learn something you never knew about who you thought you were. 

I've run out of tomorrows, out of time. Somewhere in the morning mist and the smell of freshly cut grass, tomorrow became today, I grew up, those days are gone.

Aquaphobia - the fear of drowing

I teeter on the edge. Below, white capped waves crash like thunder on jagged black rocks. The sky is sleet, the sea is steel. The wind howls and I begin to fall towards the deadly foam below.


Then all at once, your arms are around my waist, you pull me into yourself, hold me against your warm beating heart. I whisper a hundred thank you's, a million I love you's, I tell you I can't swim. You remain silent and constant for a minute, absorbing my tears with the back of your hand. 

Then, as I catch my breath, without warning, you caste me away from yourself, out of your arms, over the edge. 

The fall is long, longer than I would have thought. The wind whistles in my ears, a melody of death. The scream is frozen on my lips, my arms outstretched for yours. There are no tears in my wide eyes as I hit the freezing waves. 

My mind swirls, the water swirls, all with one word: why? I whisper, 'I can't swim,' and my head slips below the water and the air slips from my lungs.

Eosophobia - the fear of daylight

When does something become unfixable? Things break all the time, but do relationships become unfixable? Do people themselves become beyond repair?

Maybe it's when you feel you've given too many chances. Or perhaps when you cry more than you laugh. It could be when you lay, listless and restless at the end of each day. 

I think it's when you stop bringing out the best in each other. When you stop being happy like you were. When you say you're leaving, and they stop asking you to stay.

Relationships break.

When I found you, you were a broken, flightless bird. You were so lost in the still, black waters of life, you had forgotten which way was up. I tried to be your lighthouse, your beacon, shining a still ray of white light into your darkness, showing you which way was up.

The day you reached the shore, I pulled you out, held you with trembling fingers, loved you, made you my own. I gently wiped your tears and held you while you blinked in the sunlight. 

But you were never meant for this outside world. I watched as you struggled to breath, I grasped your hand as you tried to run and finally I cried as I let you once again disappear into that consuming darkness.

People break.

Phronemophobia - the fear of thinking

Clear your mind. 

Is it difficult? Are there thoughts that seep into your subconscious? Do they buzz around like flies in the summer? Do the starbursts behind your eyelids remind you of something long forgotten?

What a terrible thing to have: a mind. What an endless film reel, a scrapbook filled with the faded memories of better days. What torture, to remain awake at night, a haunted house with a single name carved in the wooden door. 

What pain, to remain trapped inside yourself, edges slowly fraying, strings slowing snapping. What a horrible fate, to be doomed to think, to watch days pass by and never be mentally prepared, to be slowly unravelling as you try to pull yourself together. 

What dismay, when you pack your thoughts into carefully marked boxes only to return and find them scattered upon the floor again. What grief, at the end of a day to seek quiet only to find the clashing of cymbals and the banging of drums inside your head or a busy hive of bees building combs all over your mind.

Clear your mind.

Can you? Are you still and serene? Can you empty yourself of thought and emotion? How blessed you are, for it is a horrible, horrible thing, to have: a mind. 

Athazagoraphobia - the fear of forgetting

If you love something, let it go. 

I look down at your fingers tightly wrapped around mine, the grip of someone holding something precious, of the child racing home to show his mother the shiny stone he found on the playground, the curled fingers you wake up to from a dream where you cling to something desperately only to have it dissolve.

I love the way you look me straight in the eyes and say 'I'm in love with you.' Like it’s a deadly serious secret, like you've spent hours thinking about it, like it has changed your life. I love the way you reach for me in your sleep. Like even a dream is too far from me, like you're scared I might wander off as you sleep, like you might forget me if I'm too far away. I love the way you put your hand on the small of my back when I'm afraid. Like you're guiding me, like you want me to know you're but an inch away, like you're my guardian angel.

I love the way you kiss me on the forehead, the way you fall into step with me when I walk, the way you know I'm upset from just looking into my eyes.

If you love something, let it go. And if it returns it was always yours. 

The spaces connecting seconds, the pause between breaths, the instants linking heartbeats, they stretch into infinity without you. I swim through a constant fog of memories, clouding my eyes, slowing my heart. I reach to the other side of the bed only to be rejected be the cold, I mourn the loss of your hand on mine as I drive, I wake up listless from the false hope of days together. My eyes burn. My body pines. My heart aches. The disease of lost love, the ailment of distance, the illness of falling asleep alone, engulfs me.

If you love something, let it go.

Hylophobia - the fear of forests

What makes us want to connect? We reach out desperately for the other, seeking out commonalities, a tiny niche where we can put down roots and grow. Like a creeper plant growing on the sturdy trunk of an ancient rainforest tree, we reach for sunlight, for air, with its support.

The day we met was like a hurricane. You blew in, a cloud of cologne and compliments and swept me up entirely. It’s a slow Sunday afternoon almost three years later and I think I've finally caught up. With your eyes closed and your breathing even, you almost look like someone I used to know.

I've grown over you like a moss, spun you into a web, woven you into a silk, turned you into something that can only ever me mine. You dream on but it is my blood that flows through your veins, you inhale with my lungs, your heartbeat is a mere echo of mine. I am the creeper plant and I have spread my thick, waxy leaves into your furthest branches. You are as much mine as I am yours.

You begin to stir and I lace my fingers back through yours, I send my green tendrils into your mind and will you to sleep. I’m still climbing, three years later. I’m still using your steady ever presence to grow. I’m slowing finding sunlight through your still, mottled shade.

Your light is my shade, the heat I feel is your cool, everything you miss, I will catch. You’re eyes open beside me.

‘I was dreaming,’ you whisper, ‘of...being lost in the rainforest.’

I smile because I've been lost in the rainforest since the day you appeared in my life and took me somewhere I've never been.

Astraphobia - the fear of storms

There are tears in his autumn eyes. I remember looking into them, gold and green, and imagining slowly floating down an idle river watching the canopy of golden fall leaves in trees, unimaginably tall, as I drift by. My daydream is over, it’s going to rain.

‘Don’t go,’ he whispers. My name is like a swollen cut on his lips.

Don’t go. The words echo in my ears even now.

‘I have to.’

There is a storm brewing. Grumbling clouds are rolling over the horizon, heavily laden with unfallen rain.  The wind is picking up. Leaves skitter over the asphalt. I feel his arm on my wrist.

‘Why? Why do you have to go?’ I let his question hang in the air, as heavy as the clouds converging above us.

Lightning flashes. The air smells like earth anticipating rain.

I look up at him, gravity weighty on my heart. there is  no way to explain that no reason to stay is every reason to go.

The clouds break, a million teardrops all at once. A million echoes.

Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go.

Cosmophobia - the fear of the universe

As a young girl I was somewhat obsessed with the stars. I remember wondering if God was actually keeping us in a shoebox and those specks of light where the holes in the lid to let us breathe. Was there someone watching over us, storing us under his bed every night? Are we God's ant farm?

I grew up and my ideas about God and life changed. Sometimes I still feel like we live in the ant farm and the real world is glowing outside the lid, through those flecks of brightness in an empty sky. But other times, when I see the shafts of light spilling through the stained-glass windows, or the sun glistens on the ocean, I realize God isn't out there somewhere, poking holes in the lid, He's in here. He's in everything. He's the sound of rain outside late at night, the freshly fallen dew on the grass, the wingspan of a bird in flight.

But laying beneath a star laden sky, I feel so small in the greater scheme of things. With all that wonder and majesty in the universe, I feel like an insignificant girl trying to make it in a shoebox world.

Heliophobia - the fear of sun

One of life’s greatest lessons can be learned through sunflowers.

Each and every day they follow the sun’s arch through the heavens. Ten thousand yellow faces look to the sun, like children following their mother, young, naive and enamoured. A field of saffron, jonquil and ochre, all looking up with eyes full of wonder, unable to turn away.

But in the end it is that which we love that destroys us. Petals dry and curl, faces turn down, seeds fall like freshly fallen tears upon the earth.

Mazeophobia - the fear of getting lost

My hand rests on your shoulder, I trace over your collar bone. How can I tell you what I feel? I want to know every thought; I want to wade, knee deep, into the bent reeds of your mind, intrepid and unafraid.

I want to run my fingers over the wooden shelves of your subconscious, the soft morning sun warming their oak, and come up with the dust of a million forgotten memories.

I imagine some vast blue sky, familiar azure yet foreign clouds.

My palm is over your heart. I could get lost in the flood. You are an ocean, an unfathomable depth of places I can never explore. I want to light a bonfire on your shore; I want to set fire to every dark corner of your psyche.

I feel your breath on my neck and all at once, I lay cold and awed in the tall, swaying grass as a vermillion sunset sets the sky ablaze.

I want to blow over you like a hurricane, upsetting everything you take for granted, swirling the leaves of your thoughts into a crescendo.

 Your laugh is cool water on my scorched subliminal, a welcome dive into a still lilac lake while birds fly south and autumn leaves fall to earth. I want to float, to fade into a speck of light in your golden ambiance.

“Never leave me,” I whisper.

I feel you smile into my hair. It is a still southern night filled with the cadence of a thousand lonely crickets, singing to a forlorn, silvery moon.

“Never,” you whisper back.

Sedatephobia - the fear of silence

Growing up I was never able to put my feelings into words. Good feelings, bad feelings, being afraid, being sad or lonely, I could never express it to anyone. It left me with the eerie feeling of watching my life from the outside, where I couldn't do anything to change what happens to me.

After a while I started to write. At about the same time as other teenage girls started trying to keep diaries with doodle filled margins, brimming with 'secrets' and initials in marker hearts. The only difference is that I didn't stop when the other teenage girls abandoned writing, 'Mrs Timberlake', for real boyfriends. I guess writing gave me something different.

For someone who was never able to speak, writing came like a safe haven. I would fill pages, my waves breaking on the shore. Putting pen to paper allowed me to empty the thoughts spinning maddeningly around my head between neat lines, where they were somehow more understandable, less overwhelming. Pages slurred with the anger of being different. Pages stained with the loneliness of being ignored. Pages scarred with the pain of struggling against my own mind.

I grew up of course, but so did my writing. Nothing changed, everything changed. I learned to channel myself into writing better. I learned to cry in words. 

It was finding myself and losing myself in the same breath. It is the sweetest escape and a gilded cage. It still remains the moon in my sky, a glowing orb lighting the inky blackness of my confusion.