A Halloween eve soliloquy

The feeling of being scared is unlike any other.

But is it worse than being frightened?

Or petrified?

What is the word or description that is tantamount to combining all three?

Being shaken to the core is what comes to mind.

Your innards are restless to the point of nausea.

Your brow sweats.

You feel pressure at the back of your eyes.

Your torso strains as if becoming a distinctly separate entity as you feel it clamoring to separate from your head, arms, and legs.

Only if you are standing still can you be shaken to the core?

Movement of any kind is the body’s defense mechanism for refuting fear.

Flight enables birds to remain unconsumed by it.

Running until exhausted culminates with the fear on top of and consuming you.

Your heart may or may not race. What is worse than either of those is the pounding in your chest that occurs while standing still.

The boogeymen are not the members of the New England Patriots defense.

They are the beings of the dark who touch your shoulder.

They are the rotting flesh you think you see on the floor in front of the closed bathroom door.

And their habit of decomposing before your eyes can take just enough of your breath away that you never fully recover and die days later.

The boogeymen typically come while you’re sleeping,

Sleep, the temporary death, leaves us all without control.

We are unable to dictate what occurs when we sleep.

Horror is a perpetual trick and a never-happening treat.

Doors are the transient portals of horror.

Whether in nightmares or waking moments, we cannot resist their lure.

We are compelled to open them by some strange force of boogeymen.

We know we should refrain.

But we cannot help ourselves.

Instead of moving slowly, cautiously to doors, we are driven to walk faster as we approach them.

By the time we realize we are acting irrationally, our hands are on the handle and turning. By then it is too late.

We swing the door open, the boogeymen grab us by the lapels and forever strip us of our sanity in the process.

The clowns of childhood do not reside here.

Only those with grimaced expressions and bladelike teeth can be found.

Bozo is most certainly not thy name.

Begging for your life does no good when you are shaken to the core.

It’s as if you are already gone.

For all intents and purposes, you are.

Effective beggars have bargaining chips.

You have no such equity.

Fate is a cruel tempest.

Especially on Halloween eve.

Bereft of all you have and whatever you will ever possess, you have no notion of long-term survival.

Living in the moment and making the most of your fear.

Yearning for it to be done with you.

Harshly full of knowledge horror is now always to be with you.

Helpless.

Unable to make a stand.

Lacking any strength, stamina or defenses.

Hope’s, along with your own death now upon you.

No recourse whatsoever.

You have been eaten by the death nomad otherwise known as Halloween eve.