When I was a little girl of about seven or eight, I was so engrossed with playing outside (I was rarely allowed to do this) that I didn't notice that a) it was already getting dark and b) my family,and I mean everyone from my family,was nowhere in near sight.
When I asked my neighbors where they were, they told me that they were in my other house, which was like five minutes away if I'd walk. So walk I did, but I was so scared of the drunkards and the dark combined, but I still tried to remain calm. However, when I got to the road by a particular neighbor's house which I've only entered once, and never returned to, simply because I wasn't really friends with the kids there and they had no electricity and clean water, someone called my attention with a "psssst!' so I turned to look, but there was no one. I decided to continue walking, even though I was really freaked out, and then it happened again. This time, when I looked, a girl in white with long hair, about my height, was at the door, staring straight back at me, making weird sounds with her throat. I was so scared that I shook and ran in circles, and then I entered their yard screaming and crying, and then I ran home. When I got there, my father was sitting on the wooden bench outside, trying to calm me down, asking me what was wrong, so I told him, and we went back to our neighbor's house. My father spoke to the old lady there and told her that one of her grandchildren played a prank on me, and that she should reprimand the girl.
She said all of her grandchildren were still at the junk shop, selling whatever it was they got for the day. Until today, we all don't know if that was really a white lady, or if someone really was responsible for it, but one thing's for sure. I'm afraid of ghosts.
When I was in sixth grade, our class had a Girl Scout Camp held in the largest elementary school in town. One of the things I wasn't excited about when camping was that I always got sick on the second day, so that my father and grandmother always insisted that they visited me, just in case.
My classmates thought it was really sweet, and most of the time they envied me. My family would visit me nightly, bringing me food and other stuff the other kids didn't have. Like usual, I got sick, and they were convincing me to come home with them on the last night of camp, but I said no. Luckily, I said no.
The next day, when I got home, my sister told me that my aunt found a snake on my side of the bed the other day. It was a poisonous kind,and even until now, typing about it, I still get goosebumps. My aunt was able to kill it, but ever since that day, I wasn't able to go to bed without worrying that there might be another one.
Days after that, I was hanging out with my best friend in his house. His mom was about to cook rice, and their kitchen didn't have a concrete floor. Their sink was made of bamboo sticks, and there was this huge drum of water in the corner, right below the improvised stove.
She was leaning down to fetch water from the drum when the dipper fell to the ground, and when she bent over to get it, there she saw a snake, curled beside the drum. She called my friend and they killed it with a broomstick, but since then, I've been terrified of snakes so much that I can't look at them on TV, on a computer, or even in books.
My third fear is something every one of us fears, that's to grow old alone and never really reach my full potential. I've always dreamed of having a family of my own, and I can't imagine myself not having kids, a stable job, someone to come home to. To me, it's more like a goal, and I admit that I'm sometimes guilty of rushing fate and not trusting whatever force is out there that brings people's lives together. I can't imagine myself looking back one day to this very day and wondering why I was sitting in front of this wheezing machine instead of out fulfilling my dreams. I've got to do something, but I'm also scared of failing.
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