Internally Exploding

- Sometimes when I'm playing music on iTunes, I watch as the timer counts backwards to zero and become increasingly concerned that the band won't finish the song in time.

- When I fill in crossword puzzles or sudoku squares, often I pretend I need to finish within a certain amount of time or else someone -- a friend, a family member -- will die.

- When crossing a street, if I see a car coming at me from a few blocks away I'll keep my eyes looking straight ahead as I continue to slowly walk. Then I convince myself the car has sped up and may hit me moments before I make it to the opposite curb.

- The extremely infrequent times I go in a pool, when climbing up the ladder out of the deep end I pause on the second-to-last rung so only my shins-down are submerged. Then I worry someone will grab my ankles and pull me under.

All of this comes from: when I was young, my mother, sister, and I would gather all of my stuffed animals and we'd huddle together on the stairs in our house. Meanwhile, my father would be roaming the first floor wearing an old man mask -- one of those rubber ones that look pretty realistic and terrifying (especially when the mask wearer would stick their tongue out through the mouth hole... shudder...) -- ready to scare us. The idea was, the stairs were a safe haven. And the way the walls were, when you were on the stairs you couldn't see the rest of the house -- it was basically a diagonally-inclined hallway -- so my father was somewhere out there. In the living room? Right around the corner? Who could know for sure? All we knew was at some point, a terrifying old man was going to jump out and scare the bejesus out of us. But here's where the real fun started. My sister and I were still at that age where our stuffed animals were personified. They all had their own character traits and quirks. They were our friends. And so when I would throw Kermit down to the bottom of the stairs, away from the safety of the stairwell and my mother and exposed to the horrors of the old man, I couldn't leave him there. I had to save him. Which, of course, meant I had to sneak down to the bottom, hope against hope that the kooky scary old man wasn't right there, just around the corner waiting for someone to rescue Kermit -- using Kermit (my own friend!) like a worm on a hook -- so he (the terrifying old man) could jump out and terrorize me. My heart would beat faster and faster as I went down each step until I would finally make a mad dash to where my green buddy lay, grab him, and furiously scramble up the stairs to our sanctuary. It was horrifying. It was terrifying. It was wonderful.

I felt like I was going to explode.