21 April, 2008
Well i wrote this for an assignment i had for scriptwriting, i was supposed to develop a character, well i made a short story out of it. Tell me what you think.Eric was a pretty normal fellow. He had a routine job at a bank, he didn’t like his cereal too soggy and no matter where he was, his shoes would always be polished to a gleaming shine. He had just turned 27 that year but was still mostly unsuccessful in love. No, the only thing special about Eric was his irrational fear of water.
It had all started simply enough. My mother had been forced to endure watching her sister struggle against a powerful water current that dragged her down despite her struggles and inevitably drown. I don’t think the mental image of my sister’s body being dragged out of the water ever truly left her mind. So it was with this fear crippling my mother’s life that I was raised. My mother never let me go for swimming lessons, I went to the beach maybe twice in my life and both times with friends. I couldn’t even bring myself to walk barefoot on the shore both times.
After her death, my mother’s most persistent reminder became my Aqua-phobia. And like wine, with time, the fear only became more nagging and persistent. I had never been on a boat or ship. I dreaded having showers and the thought of a lounging in a bathtub full of water scared me more than any horror story ever could.
My fear got so intense and crippling that I would inevitably scare away any girl interested in dating me. The incident with Stacy comes to mind. It had been 2 months since I’d been dating her, she obviously knew all about my fear. But being my girlfriend and a woman, she had to find a way to “help me”. So for our 2 month anniversary she promised me a special surprise. Turned out it was a romantic dinner, candle light, violinist, the works, on a boat. Needless to say, when she finally let me open my eyes and see her work, I flew into an exaggerated rage, blaming her for not understanding, for belittling my fears and for trying to fix something that was none of her business. I wounded her pretty badly that night and I never heard from her again. Her pretty face covered in fresh salty tears is the last image I have of her in my mind.
Following that promising relationship, I sank into a heavy depression, until a co-worker worried about me and low productivity recommended a therapist. Therapy was something I would never have considered prior to my state of depression but at that low point in my life, I didn’t have much to lose. My therapist examined me, reassured me that my case was quite normal and asked me to find a small simple way to feel safer in water. He suggested the obvious, basic swimming lessons, a shallow pool with a trainer, he said gradually I would become desensitised to it. Well I found the idea very disturbing. I read the statistics online. I remember reading that a swimming pool was 14 times more likely to kill a child of 4 or under than a motor vehicle. Water was dangerous, it killed people everyday, I didn’t understand why I needed to overcome this fear. I had survived fine so far.
Two nights after the suggestion had been made by Dr. Nox, I woke up from one of my routine nightmares, I was in a boat that was slowly but surely filling up with water. I was going to drown, it was always with this knowledge and fear that I woke up thrashing in my bed, arms flailing, in my groggy state hoping for someone to rescue me. That night however, I was thirsty. I got out of bed, filled a cup with cold water and sat at my dinning table. It was that same night that I found respite from my depression. As I sat staring at that cup of water, watching the drops of water on the outside, drip down slowly, I saw a cockroach running across my kitchen floor. I don’t like cockroaches, who does? But It also didn’t particularly freak me out if I saw one once in a while in my house.
But something eerie happened to me right then. Instinctively I went on all fours, held out my palm and waited. A few seconds later the cockroach crawled up to my hand, just like I knew it would. Carefully I closed my palm, the bug safely clasped inside. Then gently I dropped it into the cup of water. I watched it struggle pathetically against the glass as it tried to escape. I wondered if it was thinking, “How the fuck did I get here?”, and then I just burst out laughing until tears fell from my eyes and then I only laughed harder. The bugger was persistent, I watched it for 20 minutes just bobbing around, and then I tapped the glass with my finger and went to bed.
In the morning the cup of glass lay on the table just as I had left it, with the dead cockroach inside. And thus began my weekly ritual of creature killing. It would be a whole host of different bugs, anything I found, anything that took my fancy. I tried ants, beetles, even flies. And as I would watch them struggle and drown, somehow I would feel better. Like I was proving to the world and these tiny helpless creatures what I knew all along- That water was merciless, it was cruel, it was dangerous and I would be damned if I let it kill me just as it had with those pathetic insects.
