Fear Itself

Something about the darkness seemed inviting to me after I turned fourteen. I used to stay up late on purpose, waiting until my father came upstairs for bed, so I could throw my curtains open in the morning hours and stare up at the moon and the stars above me. I started to loathe the daylight; the nighttime hours offered me a certain freedom I couldn’t find under the watchful eyes of my father. During the day, I was stifled and suffocating. At night, I could crack my window if I wanted to, and nobody would ever have to know. It gave me a sense of freedom. The darkness became a good friend of mine, something akin to a warm blanket on a cold night.

I was laying on the floor one particular night, not doing anything but bathing in the moonlight that spilled from between my opened curtains. I just stared up at the ceiling, wondering, thinking, dreaming with my eyes open. I thought of my life. I thought of where other fourteen-year-olds probably were right now. They were in school, probably thinking about friends and parties. They weren’t spending hours a day reading, studying things from foreign languages to earth science. Most people my age probably couldn’t speak three languages, but I could. They probably couldn’t pick locks, either. I heaved a sigh and sat up; my eyes drifted back to the sky outside.

There was a whole world waiting for me. It was just outside, just out that window. I could reach out and feel the night air in the palm of my hand, like the freedom was just there waiting for to grab it. My door was shut; my father would never know that I had opened the window, or that I had even left. Struck with a sudden rebellious feeling, I approached the window with a gleam in my eye. My fingers gripped the pane and pushed upward. I pushed it all the way up for the first time in my life. The window was open; I felt like I was half-way there. The cool air rushed inside, pushed by a breeze. My hair lifted a little in it’s wake, and my mouth grew into a wide smile.

I approached the window and kneeled down on the sill I usually use a people-watching perch and gazed out over the city. I saw the clean, paved streets below, the wrought iron gate separating our side of town from the sea of lights off the distant, blinking as though they were calling to me from the deepest recesses of the night, beckoning to me. A smile slid onto my face as I looked out, and I felt the urge to leap. I pressed my hands agains the bottom of the window’s opening, and I stuck my head out into the open, breathing in the fresh air. It was quiet. It was nice. I could hear the leaves rustling in the tree nearby.

My eyes fell upon the thick branch sprawled in front of my window. It was close enough that I could probably reach it if I extended an arm. Everything just felt so much closer to me now that the branch was in my sight—freedom was in sight. I chewed my lower lip as I began to lean myself out the window, swiveling on my right knee and extending the left side of my body slightly outside, toward the branch, but I suddenly realized that if I fell, I was falling two stories onto the grass below me. My eyes peered over the ledge, into the yard below, and I startled, knocking myself back inside, rolling across the floor with a loud thud.

“Thalia?” my dad called sleepily from his room. “What on Earth are you doing in there?”

“Um… um…” I stammered a bit, my chest heaving as I tried to catch my breath, racking my brain for a believable excuse. “I was… I just had a weird dream. Got a little startled. Nothing to worry about!” I called back, laughing nervously under my breath.

He grumbled faintly. “Go to sleep, Tali. It’s too late for this.”

I glanced back to the open window, feeling gripped by own fears, feeling angry for not going through with it. I forced the window shut and locked the top again. I pulled the curtains closed, erasing any form of light from the room as I crawled back into bed and accepted defeat.