My Defining Moment

I wake up surrounded by suffocating darkness, gasping for a breath that won’t come, my heart pounding. I don’t know what time it is and for a minute I don’t know where I am, I’m still trapped in whatever hellscape I was in. It takes me another minute to realise that I am home in my bed, and another minute to calm my racing heart and even out my breathing. In and out, in and out, over and over again until I’ve calmed down. At this point I’m too exhausted to go to find my parents so I settle for trying to sleep, even though exhaustion claws at the back of my throat I can’t find it within myself to sleep Every time I close my eyes I see it, I try to distract myself, try to think of anything but that. Eventually, I fall into an unsteady rest, my
It’s probably the fear that lasted the longest and was the most unfounded and illogical (part of me still doesn’t think it’s all that illogical but I ignore that part). Every time a new disaster film was released in cinemas I would turn to my parents to assuage my fears, asking “Can that actually happen?” and “That would never happen, right?” with just a hint of desperation in my voice. They would always reassure me and logically I knew it was stupid to think such a thing but that voice just doesn’t know when to shut up. It also didn’t help that I don’t know how to say no and would often end up in situations where I would sit through these films. For instance, one of my mum’s favourite films is Dante’s Peak, if you don’t know this film contains a volcano in a small mountain town wreaking havoc and subsequently destroying the town and killing people when it erupts, so I would end up watching that a lot. Another one of mum’s favourites is The Day After Tomorrow, now that one is about a super storm that causes the world to fall into another ice age and havoc ensues. I must have gotten over this fear sometime after the world didn’t actually end in 2012 (I knew it wouldn’t but that voice in the back of my head again), since then I honestly just
In my mind images of torrential, never ending, downpour smacking against the rushing water that flows through the streets, carrying debris and leaving nothing but destruction in its wake. I imagined the water flooding our house, trapping me alone upstairs with no escape, my only company the rising water bringing a gruesome fate with it. A cold discomfort would settle in bones whenever flood warnings appeared on the weather, and that feeling stayed with me until the rain stopped or the warning was lifted. No matter what I tried I couldn’t escape the rain, it hammered against the windows, the sound drilling its way into my head and staying there. The skies a dark heavy grey making it appear as though the sky would fall any minute, the cold frigid air crawled into my lungs like a thousand needles. This rain wasn’t calm or relaxing, it was violent and invading. When we were driving I would look out the window and see the water on the road just above the bottom of the car wheels, it would only be an inch or so but in my head, it seemed ten feet deep and rising. My fear of flooding was odd, the typical rain didn’t scare me if anything I enjoyed it, but as soon as that rain was associated with a flood warning my mind went into overdrive. Even when I couldn’t turn the tap off immediately I became unsettled and panicked. It was preposterous and just ever so slightly aberrant, now I can sympathise with my