Shades of Fear

by D. L. Scott

  They say history repeats itself and I was always afraid of that, too – that my husband would die, leaving me alone just as my father had done to us. I thought I was past all that after having our son, realizing that my superstitions were, in fact, just that.

  Little did I know that they perhaps were more of a premonition. Our life was a happy one until my dear, sweet, loving husband was diagnosed with what we later would find was Stage 4 cancer of the esophagus. The time we had left together ended up being a little over a year.

  During the years’ time, I endured the uncertainty but still remained upbeat perhaps a little too optimistic in thinking that my dear, sweet soul mate would overcome the dreaded disease. Instinctively, I think I was putting a wall around my heart, not wanting to feel the hurt that I knew would inevitably come and I would have to endure again another death in my short life.

  I also didn’t want to imagine my life without him. I was afraid of not having him anymore. Always an independent woman, when I met my husband, I learned to give up things that I was used to doing that typically men would do around the house.

  Now I realized that all of the things he did for me, for us, he wouldn’t be around to do. Inane things became the most important such as grocery shopping and cooking.

  I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want him to leave us. I was afraid to go on without him to help guide me with our son. He was the anchor of our family and I was afraid with him gone we would lose that, being forever set adrift.

  I also hated sleeping alone. With him next to me, he was my hot water bottle, my teddy bear, my lifeline in the middle of the night when I had bad dreams and woke up scared.

  I didn’t even think about how I was going to survive without a job. A month before his diagnosis, I retired and was going to help him with his business. Now that was by the wayside and I had to be the breadwinner of my little family.

  I prayed God would help and He did in His own way. I know He still does. Now in a better job, I still struggle but I make sacrifices for my son’s sake. It is not the life we used to have and, without my husband, still, on a daily basis I am scared of the future.

  With his passing, my heart was broken, but having the lessons shown to me by my mother and knowing I had to be strong for my son, I carried on as best I could, often crying in the shower so that he wouldn’t know how deep the cut was in my heart. Yes, he needed to see my emotions to know that this is what happens in life, but I wanted to spare him the sobs that came daily at first and then tapered off to only when something reminded me of my soul mate, tugged at my heartstrings or when the feeling of lonesomeness consumed me. I use the word lonesome for it is different than being lonely. I knew I had my son to keep me company so I wasn’t lonely.

  Eventually I realized that what I truly missed was the company of a man, someone to do things with, someone to talk to other than my girlfriends, someone to hold, and someone to love.

  I was still young and wanted it probably more desperately than ever before, knowing that my son would soon be flying the coop, leaving me alone to cope this time with loneliness and lonesomeness together, a dangerous combination for someone still so full of life, love and desire. I vowed not to become a reclusive, old woman with a houseful of cats, an animal I detest, much to the chagrin of some of my friends.

  After two years of mourning and grieving, I decided to remove my wedding rings and move on. It had been long enough and I was ready to get back into the dating world, hoping to meet another soul mate, one with whom I might spend my golden years and start to live again.

  Totally different than when I had met my husband nearly a quarter of a century before, the advent of the Internet opened up the dating arena and, many to whom I had spoken, met their mates online. I thought I would try this avenue and was confident that I, too, could find my next husband or, better yet, we would find each other.

  Still there was the fear of starting over. I hadn’t dated in close to 25 years! Would I know how to act around another man? Would I have problems talking to one on that level? What about sex? At least I wouldn’t have the fear of getting pregnant! I knew things hadn’t substantially changed from when I was younger and yet they had. For instance, feminism had taken root since I had married, giving rise to more female empowerment.

  This, of course, made me feel that, in some respects, women had really gone backwards. Yes, we wanted to be treated as equals and yet in the matter of love, we wanted to be made to feel special by the man for whom we had feelings, even loved.

  We didn’t, at least I didn’t, want to be treated as a man would a guy friend. I wanted, and still do, want to be made to feel special, to be taken care of and pampered as I would do the same for my man but in a different way.

  Then there was the matter of age. In my late fifties, I didn’t look like what my birth certificate said I should look like. I had taken care of myself somewhat. Realizing that I had to kick it up a notch and to stay healthy in order to raise my son, I exercised and lost weight, which helped me to feel more attractive and sexy. It gave me a newfound confidence. Here was the rub, though.

  Not feeling or looking my age, I found men of my generation fuddy duddies, wanting to be more couch potatoes than active and engaged in life. I certainly didn’t act my age either, relating more to people in their forties. So, I decided to earmark that age group in my search for my next soul mate. A different dynamic occurred now.

  Whereas men my age who dated younger women were patted on the back, I now wore a letter on my chest much like Hester Prynne, although for something totally different than me. Mine was a red “C,” for cougar, a term used for a hot and sexy older woman, “usually in her 40s or 50s, who is sick of her same-age counterparts which are usually hairless, have big guts, who only talk about their insurance premiums and have the TV remote control attached to their hands,” according to the Urban Dictionary. From a positive perspective, they are typically classy, beautiful women who are successful and are real head turners.

  Incensed by it and feeling quite offended, I felt that no one seemed to understand my position. Younger men in all probability weren’t going to get sick on me and die. I would be the one leaving them. Always stubborn in my feelings, I continued pursuing my wishes and everything seemed to go right.

  After a few months, I met a couple of nice men, one of whom remains my friend but we both knew it would not work out as he was much younger than I and has a skewed sense of what it means to be in a true relationship.

  Another, when he met me for the first time, brought me a welcome bag, complete with all kinds of tools that a writer would use – I had told him I was working on a book and he, too, brought his ideas to me, hoping that I would help him, too. Needless to say, it was the first and only time I met him.

  Then there was the one I fell madly in love with only to find out after planning to meet him at the airport that he was really a Nigerian posing as an American to scam women of their money. I began looking at people on the Internet in a different way – eyes wide open, if you will, taking nothing for granted and everything with a grain of salt.

  On this cold, winter night, people filled the coffee shop, wanting to warm themselves and sit on their laptops engaging in social media interaction with faceless people. Earlier in the week, the beach community had been deserted, many of its inhabitants inside after coming home from work, happy to relax after a long day. Now it was Friday night and those same people were content to leave the workweek behind by imbibing their favorite liquor, eating finger food and seeking out their perfect mate if even for a night.

  I was one of the few, eschewing the alcoholic reverie down the street for the caffeine world of the cozy shop. Whipping through the Internet dating site as if it were an old Sears catalog, I was selecting males of a certain age the same way I used to pick out toys that I wanted to put on my list for Santa to bring me for Christmas.

  I giggled at the comparison, realizing that much of what used to be on my wish list I never received but it was
fun nonetheless. I knew, too, most of these men I was adding to my potential mate inventory would either reply with notes of endless love, end up being from somewhere other than what their profile stated or not reply to my messages at all, those wanting someone of a different age, look, or brainlessness.

  I had been learning to navigate this new way of dating for over a year now and it never ceased to amaze me. Always exciting at first to engage in chit-chat with someone who looked fabulous in their pictures and imagining them to be exactly that when they ended up being shorter, fatter, with less hair and nothing like what they sounded like or wrote like.

  Then there was the fear of meeting someone for the first time after texting, emailing and speaking on the phone. A risk was always associated with this initial meeting. In fact, my close friends always were afraid for me.

  To assuage their fears, I made sure to meet any prospective suitor at a public place, usually during the day and left the person’s contact details with one of my friends just in case. Additionally, I checked in on Facebook so that at any given time, they would know where I was or where I was headed, a sort of snail trail unseen by the person I was meeting but obvious to those close to me.

  I had read enough stories about people meeting on another Internet site to know that it was scary to meet someone you really didn’t know. Granted, learning more about the person I met on the web kind of would lull me into a sense of complacency and comfort.

  It also made me stay more on my guard, realizing that everything I ever learned about someone could be a total bunch of horseshit, details falsified to make the person more attractive to me or anyone else for that matter or cover up what really lay beneath the surface.

  Another fear I had was the one to whom I was speaking would learn more about my life than I wanted to share at first. Being a widow with a teenage son, I was very protective of him as well as my life in general. On one hand, you want to get to know someone and them to know you. On the other hand, some information was best left unsaid until the relationship grew and became more serious in nature.

  Conscious of all this, I often approached men online who lived locally. Many times, though, they would soon change their location, indicating to me that they had set up their profiles when they were in town on business or vacation. This was a red flag to me and I quickly eliminated them as ones who could be scam artists, a group of people who scour the net for potential victims as if it is their job, which, of course, it is.

  Reading some of the profiles, I’m giggling louder now as I sip my coffee. It’s quite obvious that a few who purport to be American have learned English merely to be able to conduct ‘business’ here. I quickly eliminate those and settle on a few who are within 25 miles of my home.

  After all, if there is a chance at any kind of a budding relationship, I certainly don’t want to spend the majority of my time or his time driving on the traffic-clogged freeways. Long distance relationships are quickly discounted as well, especially those candidates from other states.

  I am not just playing the Internet game tonight, sitting here in this crowded shop alone. I am here waiting for what I term a coffee date, a neutral encounter between two people who don’t know each other well but who might want to take it further if this meeting works out well.

  I am always nervous before these dates. Yes, I feel like I might ‘know’ the other person but there is always the fear of the unknown. I’ve been through a lot of these over the year. Some have turned out well. Others were a complete disaster, only lasting as long as it took for me to create some semblance of a plausible excuse to leave. “Oh, my son is at home alone and I have to help him type a paper.” “I only came out for a little bit – I have to get back to my writing. Deadline, you know, and I have a task master for an editor.” “It’s a work night – can’t stay up late. I need my beauty sleep.” The excuses went on and on. However, I was not always the one to offer them.

  Sometimes the men cut our meetings short, too. One even told me that he had a surfing date with his buddies up the coast and had to get up there. In the end, he didn’t meet them, telling me that the waves sucked and that he really had wanted to kiss me.

  Sending mixed messages and if he was going to lie about this kind of thing, what else was he going to tell me that was false. Little things like this told me a lot about a person’s character. Rather than be honest, falsities were expressed.

  Another thing that scared me was the fact that the person I was to meet was really a pervert, psycho or criminal. Because of this, I had taken to subscribing to many sites that would assist in confirming not only who the person was, where he lived, if he had any kind of record and if he was telling the truth about his marital status.

  I even went so far as to obtain a full background check. Even though it cost money, it was worth it in the end especially given that not only was my life valuable but I had a son to raise. He deserved at least one parent since my husband passed away.

  This particular man that I was meeting tonight was local to me. While he had sent me a picture of himself, I was still wary. Too many times I had sat at this place or another closer to my home, waiting for the person I had arranged to meet only to find that they were shorter, older, fatter or even married. They had flown under the radar of my investigative talents because they a) didn’t have a Facebook page, b) had a Google voice IP phone or c) their email address was created too recently.

  So I waited.

  About the Author

  Roxanna Mitchell, a native Californian, has lived in the South Bay area of Southern California for over thirty years, all of which have been spent in one of the beach communities. Originally starting out in corporate law, she always wanted to write even from as early as high school. Upon the death of her husband in 2010, she decided to really embrace writing and considers it one of her many passions.

  A voracious reader, lover of life and devoted mother to her teenage son, you can see her power walking on any given weekend on the Strand in Hermosa and Manhattan Beaches where many of her stories take place. Currently residing in Redondo Beach with her constant companion, she continues to work full time in the global security industry while pursuing her passion. As the author of the Perfect series of novels, she is still waiting for her Perfect Ending.

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/roxannamitchell.146

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/roxinrb

  T209

  By Shannon McLoud

  He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

  – Confucius (551 BC-479 BC)

  The snow crunched beneath the tire of my car as I attempted to parallel park for the third time. I tried to breathe and not let my frustration win, since parallel parking happens to be something I excel at. I never, never have to attempt parking in a spot more than once! I had left work early enough to make it on time, but now it seemed that every glance at the clock on my car stereo was taunting me. A silent reminder that time was running out.

  With a sigh I decided that a little crooked was worth it if I was ever going to make it on time. I shut off the engine and took a deep breath. Turning to the passenger seat, I grabbed my bag and checked its contents; something I had done about a million times during the day. Taking a swig from the iced coffee in my cup holder, I rested my head back on the seat and closed my eyes. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.

  It’s amazing how sometimes basic human functions, such as breathing, come to you as a reminder. Something you need to instruct your body to do, even though it has done so from the moment you were born. The moment you were a tiny newborn brought into this world without knowing the dangers you would one day face, the heartbreak you would encounter, the time you would inevitably squander.

  I opened my eyes and saw them staring back at me in the rear view mirror, large, blue and petrified. I took another breath and exhaled, this time noticing how my breath collected in the New England air around me. How long have I been sitting here? W
ithout another thought I grabbed my bag and jumped out of the car.

  This shouldn’t be this scary, I told myself as I navigated through the narrow road to the immense building that loomed ahead of me. I have been through major surgery, three times in my life! A spinal fusion is nothing to sneeze at it!

  And let’s face it; a cesarean is no easy method of delivering a baby. Why does this scare me so much? Could it be the fact that for the last two years, although I have accomplished my goals, I primarily did so from behind a computer screen?

  The anonymity of the Internet is a beautiful thing. You don’t need to make sure your clothes match, that your hair looks nice, or even tell people your real age! You can recreate yourself, and in a way I did just that. But this. This is daunting to say the least.

  There’s so much riding on this, and failure isn’t an option. Yes, that sounds cliché, but it’s true. How could I turn to my husband, or look my son in the eye if I fail at this? Over the last two years as a family we’ve given up so much in order for me to be able to do this. Failing would break their hearts.

  I’m not sure when this started. Fear over something so mundane, something that happens everywhere across civilized countries every day. It must have been high school; I mean don’t most neuroses stem from high school? I remember sitting in Mrs. Hood’s class.

  Ugh! I still shudder picturing her coming up the aisle on the first day of Geometry class my junior year. Her outdated, over worn long jean skirt billowing around her, matched of course with a turtleneck. This might not sound like the world’s greatest faux pas, but to wear a turtleneck the first day of September in New England where summer clings like a child holding its mothers hand, you truly must be cold! She looked down at me, sitting in the back row of her class, wishing I was invisible in this room of sophomores, and smiled. Her smile never touched her eyes.