SCARED SICK

You can be "worried sick", so can you be "scared sick"?

That was what I felt last night, coming home to an empty house, my own heartbeat becoming the only sound I heard after fifteen minutes of being alone.

Several magazine articles later, came the first strange banging noise from the roof. Loudly. Continuosly. For a full hour.

I hugged myself, rocked back and forth on the sofa, trying to figure what could possibly cause that kind of noises. Cats? Fighting perhaps? But there were no meows whatsoever, only banging, crashing, rolling, thundering noises.

I am used to being home alone, but last night all my defenses were down: I called my sister just so that I could speak to somebody. I didn't have the courage though, to tell her that I was scared. It proved to be a wrong step: my sister is a paranoid person, she urged me to stay locked up in a bedroom. Something in her voice sent me flying to the nearest bedroom, and there I sat crumpled on the floor after locking the stupid door.

Even at the time I could see how stupid I must have looked to a person walking in on me: a full grown woman still in work-clothes crouched on the floor, in the brink of tears.

Me, in the brink of tears? Over loud noises from the roof? Me? A person who drove a barely-functioning car for 11 years, who used to leave the office then drove the said car home alone at 1 AM, and have experienced a car breakdown in the middle of the night, and in the middle of a narrow winding-down passage-way in a public parking space, and in the middle of an empty deserted road where a scary man started banging my window and demanded that I get out of the car?

In short, me, scared in my own house?

I texted two friends who told me to calm down, and because the noises wouldn't die down, somehow I couldn't calm down.

"It's a cat. A person wouldn't make noises. Throw something to the ceiling. Call me anytime you need me." was a reply from one of them, and suddenly I couldn't hold back the tears any longer.

It is so hard to admit but yes I was scared, of being home alone, of being stranded on a deserted road, of driving home at 1 AM, of everything, including that cat making thundering noises on the roof, of the thought that I couldn't possibly call my friend everytime I feel scared because --
I can't admit being scared --
because if a cat scared me to tears, then I'm afraid to think what would happen to me once I admit --

that I am actually scared sick of life itself.