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.