Tag: Rachel Wilder

I\’ve been an inveterate letter correspondent since I was a little girl. I loved getting mail in the mailbox, because it was news from the outside. I was raised in what might be now termed a cult, in an environment of severe child abuse. But the letters existed outside of all that, in a clean, happy world where people wrote of the lives they led and everything was interesting.

I remember once that I did a stack of letters for the post office. My mother had agreed to drop them off on her way to work.

A couple days later, I got a call from one of the recipients, a lady that was a friend of my mother\’s. I\’d sent her a birthday card, but I\’d expected my mother to hand deliver it so I\’d just scrawled her name in big letters across the front. My mom, on \”autopilot,\” dropped it in the outgoing mailbox.

It got to its intended recipient.

This isn\’t because it was such a long time ago. (Please, I\’m not THAT old.) It had more to do with the size of the town where we lived. There were only about 5,000 people in the greater area, and everyone knew everyone else. I guess that the letter carrier knew the recipient and figured, what the heck, I\’ll deliver it. The only admonishment was, next time, use a stamp.

We put the correct change for the stamp in an envelope and left it for the letter carrier on our route.

And who says the post office doesn\’t bring people together?

What about you, Dear Reader? Do you like to send or receive mail? I love to; leave me a note in the comments and I\’ll be happy to add you to my card list. Who knows – maybe I\’ll even remember to address your envelope! 🙂

Anxiety sucks. It tells lies. It feels true. And it is constant.

Why is it there?

That’s a complicated answer. I am not a psychologist, so I can only tell you what I understand about my own anxiety. I am a survivor of child abuse. My mother was mentally ill and my father is a malignant narcissist and psychopath. These aren’t descriptors, in that I am not saying them to be insulting. They are factual statements based on evidence of behavior. While I am not qualified to diagnose either of them, I am able to evaluate their behavior over years of evidence and those two statements fit the evidence.

Because of their prolonged brainwashing, I now struggle with regular, daily existence. I have a hyper-developed sense of danger, sometimes referred to as “hypervigilance,” which is one of the symptoms connected with Post Traumatic Stress. Anxiety is one of the symptoms as well.

The thing about anxiety is that it uses all your brain’s faculties to create scenarios that feel incredibly real, yet aren’t. It can take someone’s failure to smile in line at a Starbucks or in the office break room and build an elaborate scenario about how they hate you, want to get you fired, and are dangerous.

Take the coronavirus situation. I live in Bellevue, Washington State, the epicenter in the United States for the current outbreak. The hospital where the first recorded deaths have occurred (and are still occurring) is five miles from my house. Closer to my office.

So of course, my anxiety brain thinks I have the virus, even though I have no symptoms and to my knowledge, have met no one who has been exposed.

This, then, is a conversation with my anxiety brain:

I HAVE CORONAVIRUS.

No, you don’t. You haven’t met anyone with it.

BUT I COULD HAVE.

Yes. That’s true.

SEE? I HAVE IT!

No dear.

THERE! I SNEEZED! SEE? I HAVE CORONAVIRUS!

It was dust.

YOU CAN GET CORONAVIRUS FROM DUST!

No, you can’t. Dust is dust. Or cat hair. Besides. If you get it, you’ll be fine. You just saw the doctor yesterday.

BUT SHE COULD BE WRONG.

Shoo. Go write something.

WHEN I DIE OF CORONAVIRUS, YOU’LL BE SORRY!

Yes, that’s true. But in the meantime, write some words.

NO!

You could write about coronavirus. Write a romance in a post-apocalyptic world where there’s a continual quarantine.

…

Hello?

I’M NOT TALKING TO YOU. I’M SICK.

Okay, you go be sick. I’LL go write something.

CAN YOU WRITE WHILE YOU’RE SICK?

Yes. It’s a superpower.

If you struggle with anxiety or other issues, I urge you to seek help. Psychology Today has a great therapist finder on their website, here.

Originally posted on Aug 17, 2012 , this is a little flash fic that I wrote in response to the prompt, \”unexpected spring.\” I hope you enjoy!

“Holy cow, Monte! What the hell?” My voice carried, bouncing off the side of Monte’s house and sounding louder than it really was. “Hey! Monte!” I yelled and waved my arms.

“Hey, Louise,” he called back and cut the power to the jackhammer. “What’s wrong?”

“Look!” I pointed.

“What the…” He laid the jackhammer on its side and walked over. “When did that pop up?”

“Monte, you must’ve hit the water main or something!”

“Can’t’ve. It’s over there.” He waived an imprecise hand toward the other side of the yard. “No idea what this is.”

I edged closer. Water, brown with the stirred-up silt from Monte’s labors, swirled up from a crack in the fence’s foundation pole.

“Monte, it’s rising.”

He knelt on the other side of the fence and I could see his fingers poking around under the fence slats. “Shit.”

“What?”

He didn’t say anything right away. “It’s salty.”

I stared down at the water. “That’s impossible!” I poked a cautious finger into it and tasted. Sure enough, it was salty. “Monte, there’s no ocean around here!”

“They always did say California was going to break off.”

“That’s not funny!” I snapped. “I’m serious, here! How is there salt water in our back yard?”

His knees popped as he stood. I rose and met his serious brown eyes. “I don’t know, Louise. I really don’t. Maybe we’d better call the city?”

“What do we say? ‘Hi, there’s an ocean in the desert?’”

He shrugged. “We have to report it.” He glanced down. “Your shoes are about to get wet.”

I stepped back, amazed. “Monte, what if it doesn’t stop? It’ll flood our houses!”

“We’re on a hill, Louise. Calm down. It’ll flood downtown first.”

I had visions of a wall of water sweeping down the Las Vegas Strip and almost laughed. He smirked. I realized with a slight shock he was trying to cheer me up. “Thanks, Monte.”

He smiled, his teeth very white. “No prob. I’ll call my guy at the Water District. Let’s see what he says. Maybe it’s a pipe or something.”

“A pipe.”

He shrugged. “What do you want me to say?” He looked calculating. “You got anymore of that meatloaf?”

I laughed out loud. “You need a wife,” I said without thinking.

He looked intense suddenly and then turned to his equipment. “Yeah, that’s what my mom keeps saying,” he said over his shoulder.

For some reason, my heart was pounding and I felt hot. “I’ll go make us some lunch while you call.”

He waved at me without turning around. I walked back inside to the air-conditioned hush and got out the meatloaf. Truth was, I had made it for him. But not to flirt, I just knew he liked meatloaf. At least, that’s what he always told me. What if there was more to it?

This was silly. I hit the lights half-angrily and set about making a salad and sandwiches. I set everything up on plates, got down my tray and the pitcher for tea, and made sweet tea. I glanced outside and saw him pacing back and forth by the fence, his portable house phone glued to one ear. He didn’t look happy.

I walked out and set out the tray on the table. He saw me and walked through the gate between our properties and sat down.

“Thanks, Mal. I’ll let you know.” He hung up and met my gaze. “They’ll come tomorrow at ten,” he informed me. “He thinks I’m crazy, but he owes me for some work I did on his pool last fall.”

I looked over at the water. “What if we are crazy?”

“We’re not,” he mumbled through an enormous bite of sandwich. “It’s still rising. See the trickle? There, on my side of the fence?”

I craned my neck. Sure enough, there was a little brook forming, trundling along the fence toward our neighbors down the hill. “What if it floods?” I asked, afraid again. “You know how fast flash floods happen, Monte!”

He shrugged. “What do you want me to do? Sandbag it?”

He had a point. What could we do? I ate some more sandwich and worried.

“Louise. Stop worrying. It’s going to be fine.”

I heard a splash. Monte froze, and I could see the hairs on his neck wave a little bit. Weird. ‘Hairs rising on the back of your neck’ was actually visible.

“Crap!” he blurted, spraying bread crumbs. “Did you see that?”

Truthfully, I had been staring at his neck. “No, what?”

He glanced at me, irritated, and then focused on the bubbling water. I looked over too, wondering what could capture his attention so fully.

A black tailfin peeked up out of the water and then disappeared.

I was on my feet so fast I didn’t remember moving. “Monte…” My voice sounded breathy and weird.

He joined me a second later as another ripple disturbed the water. “Get in the house, Louise. You got your keys?”

“Right here,” I said, patting my pocket. Another fin, black and pointy, emerged slowly. By the time the eyebrow ridge appeared, we were cowering behind my kitchen curtains.

“Where’s your phone?” Monte whispered hoarsely.

“You calling the police?”

“No, the paper!”

We had a brief wrestling match over the phone, which he won. He flipped it open and thumbed the camera button. He snapped two shots of the glossy black head as the thing climbed out of the hole. It was bipedal, covered in scales, and had dark purple eyes covered with some kind of web. It blinked vertically, opposite of a human, and stood about as tall as Monte.

We watched it walk down the hill, following the water trail.

“No one is ever going to believe this,” Monte murmured.

It was then that I realized we were holding hands. Monte didn’t seem inclined to let go, so I didn’t either. I watched the black creature disappear as the sun set over Sin City.