Glimpse (a short story...comments welcome, especially from writers, please)

[SadieGrrrl]

Glimpse She is trying to remember the first time it happened, this horrible feeling of out-of-control fear. Fear like double-sided tape grasping to here heart and breath while reaching out to take hole of almost everything else near it. A well of fear, so strong and deep. Keeping her up at night and feed off the darkness. The first time seems to her now long ago, when she was eighteen or nineteen, had just moved into her first real house since leaving her parents home. And she felt very lonely and slightly intimidated in spite of having plenty of friendly roommates and the fact that her life had become alot less private than before. It started out as a red wetness in her eye. She thought , perhaps allergies as it was spring. That first shining of the spring of the north, simulaneously muddy and full of energy, the air seeming to pop with pollen, moldy growth and various other energies coming up from the sleepy earth. After 4 days of, the fresh soft skin around her young eye was becoming puffy and tender and her boss at work, a kind woman who looked after the students and other young people whom she employed, often even sending us home with leftover food, told her she needed to go see the local opthalmologist, Dr. Rand, and soon as it might be the dreaded pink-eye. She didn't know what it was but there were rampant and ungroomed dogs living in her house and she had recently adopted a cat, so she too started to become convinced of some sort of infection.  Dr. Rand gave the usual round of tests for visual clarity and capacity plus an additional two that proved uncomfortable and difficult to hold still for, but also were indicators that she had indeed "caught" a creepy infection with a too-long scientific name. He prescribed anti-inflammatory steroids and another eye-drop that widened her left pupil so that she looked like a scared cat or beautiful woman from a 14th century Venician painting. Now, after taking both drops in the morning as prescribed she would have to wear sunglasses on her walk to work as the huge difference in light coming into each eye made her feel dizzy and want to close her left eye completely, for all the tears that kept streaming from it.  A week later, trying to fall asleep alone, and during an uncharacteristically quiet night in her usually raucus house, she grew afraid. The pain, which the nice Dr. Rand had told her might take as long as two weeks to finally subside, was seeemingly worse. The whole left side of her head throbbed. And now, with the pupil-dilating drops she could see so much more in the dark. She had actually put up curtains to block out the streetlamps, which so bothered her rest now. she couldn't get the fear of dying alone out of her head. This was new. She had seen her first dead person at 6 or 7, and had unusually frank parents, who explained life and living as being straightforward and fascinating but something we all eventually die of/from. She had always felt this naive sense of life giving her what she had needed and she had never asked for much, happiness being easy for her open, creative and sensitive mind to find. She thought of the boundaries between life and death as being akin to a sea-sponge or a mother's uterus, a porous thing with the two sides always meeting, exchanging and bleeding into each other. She has been for the most part healthy and happy, if poor and sometimes discontent. She has in many ways an average life. She works, she quits. She moves, she learns. She has a variety of interests and they sustain her most of the time. But on that first night of dread there is little but fear inside her heart. She is scared like a child, wanting something to hold onto, wishing she was able to cling to her simple life like a mussel to a rock or ladybugs to turf in the wintertime. She feels death, a scary uncertainty, listening to and waiting for her, and the madness of that imagining scares her even more. Finally daylight and the promise of her morning routine breaks the fear cycle and she is free. The fear was gone for many years allowing her to forget about it. She moves on from the life of a burgeoning adult and settles in. She is able to attract interesting people into her life and they share mutual enjoyment and experiences. Life is good. She is married and then divorced, but all in the way of a divurging stream , naturally and without regrets. She falls in love and has  a beautiful child with another man, and best of all her child adores her and is bright, full of wonder and happy as well. Now she wonders about all this. When the fear came back she had weapons to bear against it. Now when it grips her chest she thinks "I'm not afraid, I've had a life. Everyone has to die. Some die too young, or in pain, or all alone. Why am I being ungrateful, as if the world would change or be unsustained without me, the worst kind of egoist.  Why should Iwhine for a special dispensation none shall recieve. What about the old? Have they not ever more to lose as the years glide by?  They possess decades upon decades of experience, knowledge, people to love and who love them." At the break of dawn she is always fine again, or anyway the fear has gone. Weeks go by, with hardly a thought of it. And she is always fine during the day, all her terrors seeming more like concepts, cautionary thoughts, even deniable. Stresses come into her life and with them a sense of heartbreak. Maybe the fear like a virus or senses a weakness, a cold sound within her heart that calls to it. Maybe she needs something else to think about besides the banalities of children and staying home at the house; the baby lost may  have been the sorrowful tie between the two, fear always creeping in to act as her best friend when she needs something more solid more than anything. She is exhausted now. Every night awakening , lying there listening - where, what, when?- not even knowing what she is afraid of. It is as if her imagination is bored and is keeping her physical body awake nights to sustain it's fear world with any abstraction seen in the night. Getting up doesn't help, reading doesn't always hel. She knows there is no literal threat. Yet it doesn't matter. This lucky night she falls asleep almost immediately - a void, a drowning, deep sleep. Suddenly she is awake and it is all around her, even in the glimpse of herself in the bedside mirror. It is everywhere at once and she cannot move or breathe but somehow she has awoken her as well. The door creaks open slowly and her daughter walks to her tenderly, in spite of the fear in her eyes as well. "Are you alright mommy?" "Yes", she says.