Claustrophobia

Pss. 55: 1 Give ear to my prayer, O God; and hide not thyself from my supplication.

Now why would a child have claustrophobia? Well as you can imagine, it was my brother again. While I didn’t have the most perfect mother and father, they were great and well rounded compared to my brother, who on too many numerous occasions tortured me.

Yes I had four brothers but my older brothers were always off doing their own thing. The youngest of the four was a loner. Often we teased him calling him a ‘peez pot’ because he wet the bed. We could often be heard taunting him because his fear of the third floor. Dark and brooding, it sat at the top of the old wooden spiraling staircase not without its creaks and shadows. We got our digs in but it was me he targeted to harm in retaliation.

I guess making my life miserable helped him in overcoming his fears or he got pleasure out of seeing his sister squirm. Maybe in some way he got off on it. I can’t tell you how many times we would ‘pretend’ wrestle and I found myself pinned to the floor by a menacing brother laughing and cackling in my face! Pinned to near suffocating the life outta me!

Tell no one!

I remember a closet that separated my sisters and mines bedroom. It was a long closet of about eight feet, but only about two feet wide. My mother often used the closet for seasonal clothes, and at Christmas, it is where our toys were locked in.

One day my brother thought it would be funny to lock me in there, knowing there was no room for me to move around in and also the fact that I was afraid of the dark with all the ghost stories we had heard about the house.

The floor of the closet was weak and my mother told us to never go in there in fear we’d fall right through to the first floor. It had been a second staircase and previous owners closed it off, placing down a plywood floor. I was trapped. Suffocating amid the roaming ghosts who had frequented the staircase, and remained locked in the closet, now with me.

This is where anxiety attacks started haunting me. I started breathing real heavy, my chest was tightening and hands were grabbing at me trying to pull me to the back of the closet. I couldn’t scream because the air was so tight in there, no circulation, no vent. I died.

Not really but to a kid locked in a tight space, my limbs were numb and I succumbed to the darkness. When my sister walked past the closet and heard noises, she wouldn’t dare open the door, in fear of the ghosts and all. That is when I heard my brother laughing outside the door and telling her he had locked me in there.

The door opened with a whirlwind of air to my depleted lungs. They found me atop all of the rubbish lying in the back, kicking my legs as if I was running; running to nowhere. I have no idea how I got to the back but as you can imagine a child’s mind what I came up with.

I came out of the darkness filled with a hatred for my brother and knew this would not be last time he’d try something stupid like this. He was out to kill me and make it look like an accident, I was sure of it. The gun incident in later years was proof.

Other occasions where he’d sit on me, knock the wind out of me, try and molest me, hurt me; the kid was what we deem nowadays a monster. A living breathing monster!

Tell no one!

My family thinks I’ll take all these stories to my grave, you know, family loyalty and all? Well, being a writer, the ‘tell no one’ rule flew out the window with the cuckoo family. I made it out alive and am here to tell anyone! Anyone who’ll listen that is. 

2 Sam. 22: 33 God is my strength and power: and he maketh my way perfect.