There is a big world out there with a lot to be loved, a lot to be excited about and a sea full of reason to live a beautiful life, but also in this world there is a cold barren forest, and in that forest is a cave where lurks the thing which we fear.
When I was still in school, one fine day in the fifth grade of my school life, I sat in one of the last benches of the classroom which I preferred, and stared out of the window at the sky, watching the birds fly by. I was in a moment of my own which was disrupted by someone and I wasn’t very happy about it but then again, the one who caused the disruption was my social studies teacher and she had done so as I was not paying attention while she was teaching.
I was asked to stand out of the class after it was discovered through a series of questions that I hadn’t heard a single word the teacher had spoken during the class. I stood outside more bored than remorseful, then I saw it, in the room on the opposite, towards my right.
It was a biology lab, and the thing that used to catch the attention of most students was the artificial skeleton that hung on a steel frame. Many students had a certain amount of fear of it, in their minds they associated it with the horror side of the supernatural elements. But some like me did not, in fact I found the subject quite interesting and it began a spree of reading books from the horror genre from the library and quite many late fines due to returning the books late.
I genuinely enjoyed it for some time as a kid, not being scared of the horror while most were, in form or another. It even gave me a false feeling of not being scared of anything at all. But little did I know at that time that life has more than ways of getting to you.
Unlike other children, I had taken my time learning to go down a slide in the playground, without realising that why I needed so much time and it wasn’t until much later when I was standing at the mouth of a long water slide at a waterpark I realised, ‘I have fear of heights’. It was a school trip and there was a line of other students waiting behind me. I said I had to use the washroom and climbed back down using the stairs, I did hear a few laughs which I ignored.
Eventually I did start enjoying water slides but height is a different thing, there are things far taller than waterslides. There are buildings which are getting taller and taller over the years. Every time I walk or drive past a multistorey building and look at the apartments on the top few floors, I wonder if I would have been comfortable living there, although I admit the view is great from up there, but in the end the earth is far and that’s something that will always bother me.
Written by Anuran Chatterji
Early Morning Memories 
One response to “Trying to Hop over”
Happy weekend!
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