Behind two, sliding, mirrored closet doors, hidden among snow jackets and my mom’s wedding dress, a realm of monsters lay, patiently waiting for my final bedtime story to be read. My parents, exhausted with my nightly pleas for “one more book” in order to get them to fall asleep in my bed (the monsters stayed away as long as they were there), got me a little Tinkerbell night light. She was no use; she just illuminated the little crack in my closet that refused to close no matter how hard my little arms tugged. For years, claws and tentacles leaked out of that crack and paraded around my room in the shadows each night. I don’t remember when they stopped coming out, but I know why. They were frightened, frightened of the much scarier monsters that had moved into their old stomping grounds.
My juvenile fear of the dark was renamed insomnia. I was, and still technically am, scared of the dark—scared of monsters. My imagination still runs wild at night. Now, I don’t mistake the shadow of a waving tree branch for a clawed hand, but I mistake my friend’s bad mood as evidence that she hates me. My nightlight was replaced by my phone screen. Instead of my parents protecting me, a couple of sleeping pills do the trick. These monsters don’t reside in my closet, they reside within me. These monsters are insurmountably scarier at night, but they also don’t go away during the day. If only they were as polite as the other ones and had more reasonable haunting hours.
I miss the monsters in my closet. I miss the feeling of my little heart pitter pattering against my pink pajamas instead of this intense pounding that rattles my entire body. I miss fearing something that feels like an immediate threat, not something existential and intangible, like whether or not I’ll ever do anything meaningful with my life. Now, the scariest things in my closet are the jeans that don’t fit anymore and the laundry basket that is overflowing with a month’s worth of dirty clothes. If only my 6 year old self knew that the monsters in her closet were there to distract her from much more terrifying things
Unfortunately, because these monsters live in my head, daylight doesn’t prove to me that they don’t exist. Maybe that’s because these ones really do. Or are they as imaginary as the ones that haunted me as a kid? Does that mean I’ll outgrow these monsters as I get older? Will I look back 20 years from now and yearn for these fears? Or are these ones here to stay?
It’s currently 2 a.m. as I’m writing this, and, much like my Tinkerbell night light, doing this is shining an awfully bright light on these monsters. The former never helped me get over my fear as a kid, so I suppose this is a particularly apt metaphor, since writing this sure as hell isn’t helping either. With every clack of the keyboard, more claws, fangs, and spikes break out of my head and onto this page. I can see them much more clearly now, and they feel realer than ever. I miss the monsters in my closet.