Why I Should Not Live Alone

Ahem. . . yes, I perhaps lost it a bit last night as you may have noticed in this last post.

I have never been good with nights, not since I was a small girl who would lay in bed awake in the dark in the middle of the night convinced I was hearing burglers in the house. I was terrified of the burglers but even more terrified of my parents' reaction if I called out for them or got brave enough to go to their room. They were never kind in the middle of the night when roused from slumber for childish fears. So there I would be, in bed, covers pulled up over my head, trying not to move, not to breathe, not to let the burglers I imagined in my head find me. Eventually, exhaustion would force me to sleep.

Fast forward to young adulthood, living with W. Although it didn't happen as frequently as in childhood I would awaken in the night having heard a sound or smelling something odd. Was the sound that of someone breaking into the house? Was that smell a fire starting somewhere in the house? I would wake W, and he, like my parents, would be angry that I bothered him for what would almost always turn out to be nothing. (There were two times however when I was right. One - the creosote in the chimney of our woodstove caught fire thanks to the landlord who assured us that we didn't need to have it cleaned as he always took care of it himself. Right. Two - the time some drunk bastard mistook our home for his friend's place and was trying to get in the sliding glass door. In both cases, W stayed in bed while I got up and dealt with the situation although he did go outside when the firefighters arrived and they asked him to during the chimney fire.)

Fast forward to last night. I was awakened by a very loud crashing sound that rattled the windows in the house. I still don't know what it was for sure. Thunder? Could very well be, but I never heard any more. The falling of the neighbor's tree under the weight of the ice? Could very well be, but somehow it didn't seem like the sound I would've imagined for that. I guess I'll never know for sure other than to be sure it was related somehow to the storm. It scared me a little, but not a lot. I'm a big girl now. I've heard thunder before. I got up and used the bathroom and returned to bed ready to go back to sleep. Then the creaking and cracking and thumping noises began. Sometimes fairly soft, sometimes pretty loud. I freaked. I went through the house, looking out every single window trying to see what was happening. I wondered what I would do if indeed a tree fell on the house. Who would I call in the middle of the night? It didn't seem like a 911 type thing. Yet it didn't seem like the kind of thing that you would want to just wait until morning to handle either if there was damage to the house. I settled on the homeowners' insurance company. That's who I'd call if something happened to the house. Surely they would care about mitigating losses if nothing else.

So I laid in bed, listening, scared to listen, yet scared to not listen, waiting for the end of the world while the rest of the world (both N and the dog) slept peacefully and blissfully unaware. I got on the computer, because that's what I do, and thankfully I found an angel on Twitter who Twittered me through the scariest parts of the night until I was finally ready to try to sleep again.

This morning, in the light of day, it is easier to cope. Daylight does that for me. The neighbor's tree did indeed break under the weight of the ice. It does not appear, however, that it damaged either their house or mine from what I could see. There are a couple of trees in my yard that are questionable. I want to look at them more closely once the ice melts to be sure how much is bent vs. broken.

I survived, but I didn't like it. It isn't the way I want things to be. I want to have someone to whom I can turn when shit like this happens, for help or at least just for company so I'm not so very alone. I hate being alone.