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    Today's Literature Via Craigslist Missed Connections

    And cue the tears.... brought to you by Washington DC

    At one point I stopped searching for you. I stopped religiously checking my phone, continuously staring out the window, logging onto my email every other minute thinking the next one would be from you. I stopped constantly looking around the corner thinking that you would be there waiting. I don't know when it happened, I just remember that it happened; the realization that I was no longer waiting, no longer wanting and no longer caring. It was like I was numb. It was like that moment when you realize that you're no longer scared of the dark, that you no longer sleep with a night light, or that you stopped checking under the bed for monsters. You don't know when you stopped, you just know you did. For me though, it was always the closet. I was never worried about monsters under my bed because for them to get there it would mean that they would have somehow bypassed me, and I was always on edge, even as a child. It would mean that they would have had to take some alternative shape where their legs got shorter or their body smaller, and somehow misshapen to squeeze under a small space for a long period of waiting. It would mean that they would have somehow managed to deform or distort their figure to get there, and that to me never seemed realistic. You see, I was never afraid of monsters like that. You know, the ones with the tentacles that would come out from under the bed and grab you, the ghosts that would suddenly make the room temperature drop to below freezing, or the boogey man that would come and kidnap you in your sleep. I was never afraid of Dracula, or zombies. I never thought that Martians would attack the world, I wasn't afraid of Frankenstein or Godzilla. I didn't sleep with a night light because I was scared of Bloody Mary or the Candy Man. It was always the monsters in the closet that scared me because those, they always seemed more real to me. It was the sense that it could be an actual human being in there, and I say "being" loosely because I guess to "be" you have to feel some sort of emotion and as for monsters, we all know they don't. It was the ordinary monsters that I was always afraid of. The ones that came in and caused chaos, left madness behind, and then calmly walked away. I was always afraid of the monsters that blended in, the ones lurking around the corner. The monsters I feared, they were real, they didn't just go away when you opened your eyes; they didn't stop existing because you suddenly stopped fearing. They were always there and whether I caught them in my closet or all the dead bolted doors and locked windows kept them out, it didn't matter, because there would always be another night and there would always be another one calmly waiting. A blanket could never protect me, the light wasn't going to save me and running to jump on the bed from ten feet away wouldn't help either. So I guess I stopped checking. I think that's when the monster left the closet and got in my bed. And slowly it got into my head and under my skin. It came in as a well-dressed, charismatic, absolute gentleman; foolishly loving and a little too calm; mistakenly loyal, and completely fake. It blended in and those are the scariest monsters of them all, aren't they?Everyone can look at Barney and know he's a dinosaur but take the man out of the suit and no one can tell he's Barney or a dinosaur. He'd blend in, he'd be one of us and that's what makes him so scary to me. I guess Barney is more of a metaphor because he was always supposed to be one of those friendly monsters that sang songs about friendship and love but I don't know man, there was something in those eyes of his. No one can be that happy all the time and he made me wonder if he was just faking it and that made him a lot scarier because he just sucked you in and all those thoughts and feelings, none of it was genuine at all. I guess it's the blending in though that makes the monsters of your adulthood a lot scarier that those of your childhood. If you know there is a vampire behind you, you're going to run away but when you turn around and see a friendly face, well, that's when you start running towards it. It's not till your standing in front of it that you register the monster that really is and at that point, well, I guess at that point it's too late. Eventually though you realize that Dracula fears garlic; that tentacles only belong to octopus and they live a whiles away from under your bed. That zombies were once just living beings, that life has yet to be discovered on Mars, there is no giant dinosaur-lizard-crocodile cross breed tearing down buildings, and that Frankenstein was really only supposed to be a representation of man's addiction to raging power, corrupting greed and fear of the unknown. That's when you too realize that the only thing you have to fear is yourself and that's when you miss the days when the Ghostbusters could save you and the naïve thought that salvation would arrive with the crack of dawn if you only just happen to make it through one more night of the unknown that lurks in the darkness, comfortably tucked under your warm blanket. Your eventually bound to realize that you somehow managed to defeat all of these other monsters as a child and you wonder why as an adult your still afraid of any monster, no matter how real. The monsters that used to scare you, fed off of fear. The minute you stopped believing, they disappeared into thin air, as if they were only a figment of your ever glowing imagination for a brief glimpse of time. Then suddenly, they stop existing. You stop fearing and they just go away, simple as that. I don't know when it happened, but that's exactly how it happened with you. We can never tell the simple passage of time, just that time has simply passed; we can't remember events but we can remember the feelings elicited by those events. So for that, I can't tell you when you broke my heart or when you became that monster I feared the most, but I can tell you that my heart was broken, and that I was scared. And because of that, I can't tell you when I put the pieces back together or when I stopped fearing, but I can tell you it's as good as new and I'm not afraid of you anymore.