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.