I’ve always had multiple fears growing up: heights, spiders, insects, darkness, ghosts, Great Danes… well, I’m basically afraid of everything. I’ve always been afraid of everything, ever since I was young. My irrational fear of everything surrounding me has also affected my daily life. I’m even afraid of going to school every morning because I didn’t want to go through the same torture from my classmates and teachers. I just don’t want to get pushed around and screamed at throughout the school day and then cry in front of a lot of people. It’s humiliating, and it still gives me night terrors every night when I go to sleep.
But now, I have this new irrational fear. A fear that started off in high school and all the way through college and up to today. I have this fear of being watched by everyone. I have an irrational fear of being stalked every day.
It all started in my sophomore year in high school. There’s this guy who has been scaring me daily in our mutual class. I still remember his name, though I will not mention it since his name gives me trauma whenever I hear it. Instead, I will call him OJ. OJ was angry all the time and his unexplainable ire scared me whenever we had class together. He would simultaneously scream and complain about everything as he was so severely cynical. He would even stay in the corner of the classroom all by himself and stare at his own desk, as if he was hiding something from the entire class, especially the teacher.
Seeing OJ at the back of the classroom at every lecture brought me irrational thoughts about him. I was scared that he would be the next school shooter, judging by his appearance and attitude alone. I’m honestly not sure what OJ’s history was; I never had the audacity to even talk to him due to his constant nihilism about everything. I was afraid that he would scream at me for no reason, and that would send me post-traumatic stress. I wouldn’t say I could relate to what OJ is going through as I compared my cynicism to his since I hardly think like him. I would never go that far as I suppressed my negative emotions every day during school for a reason.
It wasn’t until this happened.
I was just raising my hand to answer the teacher’s question during the lecture. OJ, without even raising his hand like the others, called the answer out loud before I had the chance to be called to answer. It always aggravated me whenever people call the answers out loud without raising their hands first; it always has been my pet peeve ever since elementary school. Well, this was high school, not kindergarten. Anyway, I complained to OJ about it (I mostly wanted to show off how intelligent I was in school). When I faced back towards the Smart Board, I heard OJ laughing loudly… and then I heard him say something that I can never forget or erase from my unwanted traumatic past.
I heard OJ saying that he wanted to kill me–loud enough for the entire class to hear.
I was so speechless that I cried, right in front of the class and the teacher. I went to the teacher about it, and, with a deep sympathetic facial expression, she said she heard it as well and defended me. Some–not all–classmates defended me as well. The teacher then told me that I should report it to the dean of students, and I did.
When I explained everything to the dean, she became sympathetic as well. She asked me if there was a reason for why OJ said such a thing to me. I told her that I wasn’t sure. The dean then asked me if OJ… liked me, as in, if he had a crush on me. She even complimented me that I was a pretty person and that could be the reason why. I was flattered at the pretty compliment, though this whole “he had a crush on me” theory was something that I was very reluctant to explain. I most certainly do not fucking reciprocate my feelings towards OJ. He was definitely not my type. I just told her that I don’t even know about that as my only answer. With everything explained, the dean decided to report OJ to her office about the threat he made towards me.
By the time OJ and I were in the same office together–with one of the school’s securit guards for a great, safety measure–the dean forced OJ to apologize to me. I found out that she made a deal with him: if he didn’t apologize to me, he would be suspended. That was what I wanted to happen, albeit it didn’t, unfortunately. OJ did apologize to me. I reluctantly forgave him. I said “reluctantly” because he was ver unenthusiastic to apologize, judging by his body language and a subtle eye roll that I was smart enough to notice, but didn’t say. The dean said that this was just a warning, though she would keep close track on OJ, as well as me, for safety reasons.
Throughout the rest of the school year–and on to the next–everything seemed fine, I guess. It turned out that it was not.
Throughout the rest of my sophomore year and up until the end of my junior year… OJ has been talking out loud about me behind my back with his friends. I could peripherally see him glaring angrily at me as he was walking down the hallways, OJ even stared at me outside of the classroom I was in while I was explaining something to one of my classmates. I only took a brief glimpse of him and then returned explaining to my classmate about the subject we were mutually learning at that time. I wasn’t too sure how long he was standing in the hallway staring at me with that death glare on his face. Although, this was when the irrational fear came into the picture.
Every day after school when I take the public bus home, I get this horrifying feeling that OJ was stalking me as some kind of revenge for getting him into trouble. I get this feeling that he would follow me home to know where I lived. I also had the feeling that he would bring his friends with him as well, so they all could stalk me as part of his vengeance from that time. I even had this terrifying feeling that OJ and his friends would do things to me; something so dark and dreadful that I’d rather not explain to detail. Instead, I’d rather share it metaphorically by poetry.
When I wrote these two poems, I was simply expressing my delusional paranoia. It didn’t actually happen in real life, though they appeared in my night terrors many times on certain nights. I would get shaken in my sleep whenever those nightmares appeared. I would even get terrified of going back to sleep should the night terror appeared again. In those dreams, there were butterflies everywhere, hence the titular title to these two narrative poems I wrote.
Since I am very uncomfortable explaining what these nightmares represent in detail, I’d rather share what these two proses vaguely represent to give my viewers who are reading this an idea of what kind of terror I go through. Again, these only happened in my night terrors, not in real life, and I do not want to be judged or victim-blamed for it.
Here it goes:
Become a Fighter, Not a Victim <3 