Conversations

“Your word is, unctuous.”

“Unctuous.  Could you give me the definition?”

“Excessively or ingratiatingly flattering; oily.”

She stood nervously in front of the crowd.  Though it was not a crowd, really.  More like a gathering.  Or, she mused silently, a gaggle maybe.

And speaking of gaggle, why couldn’t she have gotten that word?  Billy had gotten catastrophe.  And who couldn’t spell catastrophe?

Billy, for one, couldn’t spell catastrophe.  Which meant, if she could just make her way through ‘unctuous’, she had this thing all locked up.

“c-a-t-a-s-t-r-o-p-h-e,” she thought, almost out loud.  Just on the backside of her teeth, she realized ‘unctuous’ didn’t start with a ‘c’.

Unctuous, she was sure, started with a u.  That part was easy.  Those other letters, not so much.

“There has to be something silent in there,” she thought again, this time fully to herself.

No giving up now, she’d come this far.  Time to shoot for the moon, time to do something galactic (which, she remembered, was another word she had to spell).

Here goes…

“U-n-c-t-u-o-u-s. Unctuous.”

Silence filled the school library.  At that moment, she was all alone in the middle of Madison Square Garden in her mind.  Seconds passed like hours, and pounded in rhythm with her heart.

“That’s correct.”

Anything but that.

Spiders?

I had so looked forward to this day, anticipated even the feel of the mouse as I clicked the link.  This would be the day!  The day I continued down the path of a new direction.  I was ready.

But there, staring back at me, in all it’s glorious ugliness, was the one thing I so despised.  I’d feared them for most of my life.  Never sure why, really, but I just couldn’t stomach them.  Perhaps it was the thought of an attack, or how an encounter would feel.  Maybe it was visceral.  Maybe something happened that I’ve repressed for years since.  Who can say for sure.

No matter now, I had to face it.  No more putting it off.  No more avoiding the inevitable.

I mean, I guess everyone has to face their fears someday, in some way.

And isn’t that just how it works?  Life is going along swimmingly, and there, out of nowhere, appears what you never thought would be.  You’re not ready for it.  You’ve often thought of how you’d handle it if it happens, but you never truly prepare.

Then, there it is in front of you.

And you state it over and over in your mind, to yourself.  “Well, here it is”, you think.  “I guess now’s as good a time as any”, you say.

But you don’t mean it.  You don’t want to face that fear.  You’re just killing time.

Deep down, you knew, and you know, that’s true.

Are we still talking about spiders?

He couldn’t get the sound out of his head.

No matter how tightly he squeezed his eyes shut, he couldn’t get the image to go away.

Over and over he replayed the scene, each time trying to justify why it wasn’t his fault.

The problem was, it was his fault.  The whole thing was his fault.  For months, maybe even years now, he had worked to create the false reality of his life.  Everything he had done, everything he had become, everything that everyone knew about him — it was all a facade.  Piece by piece he had delicately constructed a world of his own making.  And now, in the split second it took to hear the dull thud of leather against drywall, it had all broken down.

Somewhere in his mind was an air of invincibility.  He knew he wouldn’t be caught, knew he was good enough to pull it off.  So, as if creating the antidote to a poison, he wrote it all down.  Every last detail of his fictional world was chronicled in a series of bound journals, stored safely behind lock-and-key in his office desk.  Occasionally, when he was feeling less than mighty, he’d pull one of them out.  He’d re-read of his own conquests or trials, and he’d find himself back on top of the world.  But, he would also realize that for this to work, he could never stop.

He was so far into his own creation that even he could no longer see the lines that separated reality from fiction.  It was all pseudo-real.