Wild For You

4. Afraid to Live

April 2022

The air was cold as she stood in front of the granite slab. The tears that carved silent trails down her face were seasoned by the rainwater from above so they didn't taste as bitter by the time they hit her lips. She looked at the name carved there, reaching out a finger to trace the name as she did every time she visited. She had been coming here for the last three years.  This man was the only reason that she was standing out in the rain to begin with.

He was the one that had given her the confidence to live just a small while before he lost his own life.

Gemini Gifford was told her whole life that she sounded like she wasn't made for this world. She was told that her name sounded like it belonged to some sort of mythical ice cream. She heard all the time how the world melted her poor fragile heart in fear. Yes she had been an overly fearful child, but that hadn't been her fault. When she was just three years old, her older cousins had babysat her while her parents were out of town at a work conference. None of her cousins - nor their parents - had any sort of morals, and they let her three-year-old self stayed seated in front of the television the entire weekend while a marathon of gruesome and graphic crime documentaries was shown. She had those images ingrained in her brain. When her parents picked her up after their conference, they said she had been the worst child to put to sleep.

Who blamed her? With those images in her mind, she felt that all sorts of monsters lurked in the dark. Her father - after seeing all the phobias that Gemini got from that one weekend at her cousins - quit his job the next day. He vowed that he would take care of her. Since she was so fearful of being attacked by the world, he homeschooled her. Gemini thought that he was an excellent homeschool teacher. He made even the most boring subjects come alive. As she grew older, she had to admit that his zest for life had caused her to come alive too.

Her only escape during her childhood were in the books her father read to her or that she picked up and read herself. She always fell into reading the fairytales, finding joy in the pages of her favorite princesses and heroines. Even when she turned into a teenager, she still read those books over and over again until the spines were about to give out. She lived her life vicariously through the stories and she was happy about that. Content even. Her father wasn't though.

"You can't be afraid of life," said her father to her one day when her sixteen-year-old self stared out the front window at the typical neighborhood as it came alive with its daily activities.

"I'm not afraid of life," said Gemini. "I value my life actually. It's why I don't go outside."

Her father had reached out a hand to run it through her hair gently. He had tried to coax her outside a little at a time to get her used to the outside world. The further she got away from the house though, the worse her breakdowns and paranoia would become.

"Living trapped inside is not a life, Gemmy. That's a prison."

He held out his hand to her as she had cast her eyes down at it.

"I'm not going outside."

"Do it for me," he said. "Try one more time. You need to realize that life is worth living. Life isn't out to kill you, but you'll never learn that if you keep cutting yourself off."

She had taken his hand reluctantly, and he had closed about it immediately. He had proceeded to take her outside to show her what the outside world was like. She had remembered the panic that had gripped her chest; at the grotesque images that seemed tattooed to the inside of her lids when she closed them. When she eventually opened her eyes though, she was pleasantly surprised to see that she was standing at the end of her drive - the furthest she had ever walked outside - and she was alive. Her father had given her the proudest smile ever, squeezing her hand.