Conquering Fears

Just a silly short story I hammered out last night. Yes, I am sleep deprived.

Conquering fears

I have a friend who is very into the whole spelunking community in our small town on the east coast. They meet a couple of times a month to plan three major trips each year. My friend, who I will call Dom, has always tried his best to convince me to join them on their underground adventures, but I have always refused. I usually come up with some half-hearted excuse as to why I cannot go with him, but the truth is I am utterly terrified of small places. Claustrophobia is a very real and domineering part of my life and has always been, as long as I can remember. It started with elevators. My therapist tells me this is a very normal thing for a young kid to be afraid of, and something one usually grows out of. I didn’t. For me it just grew and grew over the years, into this deep-seething fear that I would become trapped and alone, in the dark, for an eternity.

I had been seeing my shrink for a couple of months before he started to push me. At first it was subtle. He would suggest that maybe one day I could start subjecting myself to the dark and tight spaces I so loathed. I refused of course, but he kept at it, chipping away at the walls I had erected around myself. Eventually, he told me it was time for me to start facing my fears. He took me into an underground parking garage and I, of course, flipped my s**t immediately, blacked out and awoke outside the garage.

Progress was slow, but eventually I was starting to see a small, faint light at the end of the tunnel. I mastered the parking garages, completely demolished my parent’s basement, and at last: conquered the dreaded Elevator. For my graduation, my shrink took me into one of the larger cities, dropped my a*s inside a high-rise elevator, pushed every single button and said ‘adios!’ I felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. I had faced my fears and survived. Drunk on my own feeling of empowerment, I called Dom that same day.

Dom was ecstatic. He told me we would have a blast and promised to pick me up that following weekend. In the meantime, I was starting to come down from my high. I realized that caves were not elevators. To prepare myself for entering the steel boxes that traveled hundreds of feet in the air, my therapist had made me read entire books about the topic of elevators and their statistical chance of catastrophic failure. I was now an expert in all things elevator. I knew that the chance of dying in an elevator was 1 in 10,440,000 due to the superior brakes installed in them. The odds of dying in a car crash are 1 in 100. I had never had a problem with getting into a car and speeding onto the highway blasting “Highway to Hell.” Logic became my life-raft, and I clung to it like saltwater. It helped a lot with elevators. It fucked up my afternoon drives.

Despite my reservations, I decided to man up and face my fears yet again. In the days leading up to Dom’s arrival, I filled the hours pouring over books about caves and how to go about exploring them. I decided to research the statistical chances of me never reaching the surface and accidentally stumbled upon a youtube link that told the story of some unfortunate miners that got stuck deep inside the mountain. Before I could close the video, I was greeted with the black faces of those poor men. They were covered in coal-dust, crying their eyes out, the coal running down their faces, like the mascara of a nineteen year old girl who’s watching The Notebook for the first time. I didn't do any more research that day.

Despite having met a stone-wall in my research, (no pun intended), I decided to start fresh the next day. That’s when I found the story of a man being trapped inside the terrible maze known as The Grand Canyon. He survived his ordeal, but had been forced to saw off his own arm with a dull knife to reach safety. For some weird reason, I wasn’t much reassured when learning the fact that if you went caving for two whole hours every single day in a whole year, it gave you a statistical probability of having a 1.16 % chance in suffering from a non-fatal accident. F**k this.

Dom didn’t really care much for statistics. Before I had a chance to curse his laid-back cool-guy attitude, he was parking his land cruiser next to the trail we would be traversing to get us to the cave system. Dom told me not to worry. He told me he had almost a hundred expeditions on his resume, and he had only broken his wrist once and a rib twice. I didn’t bother mentioning that he had single-handedly just poked an enormous, gaping hole in the only life-raft I had: the statistics. Having laid that to rest, we started our journey towards the foot of the mountain.

I would be lying if I told you I was having a hard time. I was having the ‘standing-on-top-an-erupting-volcano’ equivalent of a hard time. To make matters worse, Dom kept telling me these interesting tidbits about some guys he had heard about that had been trapped underground for three weeks. When rescuers finally found them, they had become utterly insane; spouting nonsense about having found the gates of hell and having been forced to eat parts off of each other. I missed most of Dom’s storytelling, being too busy trying to grind my teeth down into stumps, but I caught the gist of it. Dom finally caught on to my rapid descent into panic-land and tried his best to reassure me we would be taking it very, very slow. He had planned a ‘real sucker’s trip’ for me, meaning a short, touristy kind of trip that even seven year old girls would find boring. This brought my heart-rate down a bit, so I asked Dom to please relate to me some of his own experiences with exploring caves. Dom quickly caught on to what I was doing, and told me several reassuring tales of how he had never gotten lost underground or seen anyone seriously injured in all his time as a spelunker. Even though I knew he was trying to calm me, I found myself believing his stories and soon reached an almost zen-like state of mind. I reminded myself that Dom was a good guy, and judging by his many tales; he would be an expert at his craft. He would never let anything bad happen to me. Right?

The first sign of Dom’s uselessness came as we stood next to the opening of the cave. I had been picturing a voluminous opening in the side of the mountain, with maybe a ticket-stand, cotton-candy vendor and a ‘stick-your-head-in-a-hole-and-get-your-picture-taken’ kind of deal. What greeted me was an opening that a greased-up Calista Flockhart wouldn't be able to squeeze into. (Sorry for the 90’s reference.) Dom promised me nothing bad was going to happen. It was just a simple matter of putting my face into the dark hole in the ground and “wriggle-wriggle! In you go!” I swung at him.

Dom, having easily dodged my panicked attempt at putting a dent in his face, eventually got me to agree to at least have a quick look inside the damp hole in the ground. He swore on his dead grandmother nothing bad was going to happen. To emphasize his point, he proceeded to stick his head down into the tiny opening and release a violent burp that echoed down into the void. I silently prayed for a small bear, or at least a pissed off bobcat to latch itself to his face. He emerged from the hole unscathed. Disappointed by Dom’s face remaining whole and enraged at my failure to re-capture the bravery I had felt only days ago, I proceeded to plunge my head into the darkness below. I suddenly remembered that Dom’s grandmother was still very much alive.

I couldn't see a damn thing. This could be because my giant brain-box was blocking the only entrance that allowed any light to enter the cave, or it could perhaps be because I was clenching my eyes shut like a little girl riding a rollercoaster. Cursing my own stupidity, I slowly opened my eyes. If I had had complete control over my faculties at the time, I would have remembered straight away that I was sporting the Black Diamond 3000, the best headlamp that money can buy. But, being scared stiff by the prospect of becoming stuck inside this dark abyss, it took me a couple of panicked seconds to fumble my way into lighting the damn thing. Once I found the button and pressed it, I was immediately stunned at the sight that greeted me. The powerful light from my Black Diamond revealed an enormous cave looming in front of me. The halogen light made the walls of the cave sparkle like the sun reflected on a quiet forest lake. I was completely in awe and immediately forgot about any fears that I had possessed only seconds earlier. As I moved my head around to take in the sheer awesomeness of this place, the movement of my head made every surface glitter like it contained a million tiny diamond fragments. Before I had a chance to think, I had ‘wriggled-wriggled’ my entire body through the hole.

Dom poked his head in, looking at me like I had just sprouted wings and taken flight. When he spotted the enormous grin that was plastered all over my face, he laughed and squeezed in after me. Having gotten the obligatory high-fives and celebratory shoulder-poundings out of the way, we started looking around. I knew I was supposed to be lying in the fetal-position right now, but I couldn't sense any fear whatsoever. It was so extremely liberating that if I had been alone, I would most certainly have been shedding tears and bawling like a baby. But, not wanting to come off as a complete softy, I restrained myself.     

We walked around the cave for a while; me, gaping like a moron and Dom curiously studying me like a previously undiscovered creature he had just stumbled upon. After having basked in the shimmering glory of the cave for some time, we decided to have lunch. Seeing as I had just had a life-defining and awesomely profound moment from the emotional journey I had just experienced, it was only fitting that Dom would once again shatter my world with his indefinable ways of f*****g up. The only food he had deemed worthy to accompany us on this fellowship of fear, was peanut butter sandwiches. If claustrophobia could be described as being my emotional and psychological nemesis, peanuts could be summed up as my physical and completely real and not-in-my-head type of enemy. I was deathly allergic to them and would go into a violent anaphylactic shock if they were to touch me. Dom, of course, managed to smear an entire sandwich of peanut-buttered deliciousness all over my face.

It usually starts as a light tickle in the back of my throat. It’s an annoying feeling; kind of like an itch under your skin that you just can’t seem to scratch. What follows can only be described like falling butt-naked into an anthill that’s teeming with bullet-ants. My entire body feels like its being prodded by tiny, searing pincers, and to top it all off; my airways starts to constrict. The soundtrack to this delightful scene you ask: The wheezing sound of my trachea closing. The last thing I see before darkness descends is Dom’s stupid face flooding with the realization of his mistake.

I’m not going to completely hang Dom out to dry. He did save my life after all. After having danced around my lifeless body in an absolute panic for a couple of moments, Dom had an epiphany. Human beings with an extreme intolerance for certain substances tend to take certain precautions to assure that IF the worst thing happens, (like your friend smearing the equivalent of pure poison in your face), you have a slim chance at survival. That chance of survival diminishes rapidly towards the zero-mark if your friend has never heard of an epipen. Luckily, Dom owned every single box-set of the TV-show E.R and absolutely knew what an epipen was. Unfortunately, he also happened to be a big Quentin Tarantino fan, Pulp Fiction being his favorite movie. Armed with my epipen, his only source of information on medical emergencies being a terrible TV-show, and confusing my allergic reaction to peanut butter with a heroin overdose, he proceeded to panic-plunge the epipen into my heart.

Thankfully, Dom has terrible aim. He only strafed my heart instead of violently stabbing me to death. He later apologized for mixing up adrenaline and epinephrine. I couldn't really hold a grudge. Dom had, in his own way, done something a therapist had spent months trying to achieve; curing me of my fear of tight and dark spaces. I learned that from fear, beauty can emerge. Your nightmares can either break you or make you. Courage comes from facing the very thing you've spent your entire life trying to escape. I can now safely say that I’m completely cured of my claustrophobia. The fact that I’m now deathly terrified of needles doesn't faze me one bit. I’ll conquer that fear too one day. 

 

   

 

Author's Note

Just looking for some general feedback on the story as a whole. I haven't checked for grammatical errors or any structural mishaps, so feel free to ignore those.