The Curse of an Overactive Imagination

The Curse of an Overactive Imagination

All my life I’ve suffered from an overactive imagination. At six years old, sitting in our station wagon outside Herndon’s Market, I became convinced that the tattooed men getting out of their truck were on their way to kidnap me.

Leaning over the console, I slammed down the driver’s side lock and did the same to the back left. I locked my passenger’s side door and the back right. Then, strapping my seatbelt across me, I quaked in my seat, just waiting to be snatched.

Sure enough. As soon as the men reached our vehicle, the skinny one with the mullet grabbed my mother’s purse on the hood and the blond man in the red shirt began jerking on the driver’s side door handle.

“Mommy! Mommy!” I screamed, beating on the the passenger’s side window. My mother, crouched down while putting air in the tire, stood and the blond man began backing away with both hands raised. The other put the purse on the hood.

“We didn’t mean to spook your little girl, ma’am,” the skinny man said. “We was just trying to put the purse in there, so it wouldn’t get stole.”

My mother didn’t say anything, or if she did, I can’t remember. We then watched the men scramble back to their rusted, sky-blue truck and peel out of Herndon’s Market with mud flinging from their tires.

As my mother drove back to the ball field where my brother was playing 2nd base, I chomped on my wax bottle candy and said, “Mommy, was I almost kidnapped?”

“No, honey,” she said, “you were not. Those men…they were just trying to help us.”

Sighing, I stared out the window. I knew I’d almost been kidnapped; I knew I almost had my face on a bulletin board like that red-haired girl’s down at the Post Office. I decided that would have to be enough.

Eight years later, on Thanksgiving Day, I had such an intense migraine, I threw up. Just the thought of sweet potato casserole, cranberry sauce, and turkey livers (my brother and I used to fight over them) made me want to throw up again. So, I spent the majority of that afternoon in bed with an ice-pack. My best friend, dear heart that she is, spent the majority of hers as my personal slave: feeding movies into the VCR she’d lugged into my room and switching out ice-packs when they got too melty.

“I think something’s growing in my brain,” I whispered, running fingers over my clammy forehead. “Right here, I can feel it…like pulsing.”

Being four years older and as level-headed as the horizon, my best friend didn’t even bat an eye; but the next morning she did go with me to my doctor’s appointment where I was promptly (too promptly, I thought) diagnosed with a severe sinus infection and given a prescription for Nasonex.

Though at death’s door, I somehow managed to stomp out of the office. “How’s he even know it’s a ‘sinus infection’!” I huffed, waving my prescription in the air. “He didn’t even feel my glands!”

My mother and best friend didn’t say a word, just glanced at each other with a smile they did not do a good job of hiding.

Over Christmas break my freshman year in college, I went on a missions trip to Greece. We were a team of five girls strategically placed with one boy to ensure our protection. During training this “boy” (no boy about him; he was 6’3’’ and about 250 pounds) acted like a nice, fun-loving brother. But once we’d been shuttled overseas and stuck in an apartment above a church, the person meant to protect us became the one we feared.

At first we thought Dwayne (we’ll call him Dwayne) was just hitting on us, but then his behavior became too threatening to ignore. One night he pinned me up against a wall; the next he ran his hand over a girl’s hair after she came out of the shower. He kept his hood up and sunglasses on 24/7 and sharpened kitchen knives while the rest of us were sitting at the table, eating supper. When I’d pass his cot on my way to the bathroom, he would often be thrashing like a fish and his lips curled as if in pain.

But then a week passed without incident, and we began letting our guard down. A few days before we were to leave, we spent the evening down at the port of Piraeus, drinking thick, dark coffee and telling ghost stories. I don’t know why we were trying to scare one another. It might’ve been the caffeine in our systems, the way the clouds scuttled across the moon, the lullaby of the boats rocking in the water.

Regardless, we began telling our stories — each more horrifically detailed than the previous — and by the time we said goodbye to our Dutch friends and headed back to the church, it was almost midnight.

Our leader used her key to unlock the gate to the apartment and we walked up the cracking cement steps. At the top of them, Dwayne used his key to unlock the door.

“Let me check it out first,” he said. “Make sure everything’s okay.”

A minute later, Dwayne came running out and breathlessly cried, “Something’s in there!”

The three younger girls, myself included, who were huddled together on the landing for warmth, scattered like birds in flight and squawked down the stairs.

Dwayne laughed (sinisterly, I thought) and waved his arm. “C’mon, it’s all right!” he called.

Reluctantly, we climbed back up the steps, but once all five of us girls were inside the locked apartment, we realized the lights would not turn on.

Dwayne went to check the breaker. When he came back, he yanked at our legs dangling over the bunk bed and screamed, “This ain’t funny! Who’s messing with the lights?”

“Nobody, Dwayne,” one of the girls whispered.

The other girl said, “I’m not staying in here. You’re freaking me out.”

I wasn’t about to stay without my friends, so I took off running through the darkened room, the dining room, and into the kitchen. Although I could hardly see, I glanced over my shoulder, then jerked open the silverware drawer, extracting one of the paring knives Dwayne had just sharpened. I was wearing my orange pea coat, so I jammed that knife in my pocket and it sliced through the lining.

I darted out of the kitchen and joined my friends on the balcony. It was freezing outside, I remember that. The stars were so clear, and our breath twisted in the cold. Our leader and her friend joined us. Dwayne was still inside searching for whomever had turned off the lights, but then he came stalking out through the doors and demanded for our leader to hand over her keys.

You must understand, there were only two sets: Dwayne had a set and our leader had a set. The doors of that apartment had to be unlocked by both the inside and the outside. If Dwayne had both sets, we would have no way to escape.

Our leader, although not as alarmed as the younger girls, still could not understand why Dwayne needed her set, too. We all stood with our backs against the cement balcony and stared at this man who was still a stranger to us and who was becoming stranger still.

Once Dwayne went back inside, one of the girls whispered to our leader our fears–about the events that had been transpiring without her knowledge. Nodding briskly, she herded us to the door that had steps leading to the courtyard. We hadn’t used it before; I didn’t even know it was there. Our leader put her key into the lock and turned it. The door creaked open, and we pushed and shoved our way through. Hysteria was setting in. It had set in. It was every girl for herself. We elbowed and hissed at those who were elbowing us. I touched the pocket of my coat where the knife was, and I believe I would have used it on that man if he came down those steps with intentions to harm.

Gasping for breath, we stumbled into the courtyard and stood under the streetlights, shivering from more than just the cold.

Dwayne came out onto the balcony and paced the length of it like a caged animal. He took turns screaming at us, then laughing until he doubled over and clenched his sides.

Almost 2:00 in the morning and in Greece, we didn’t know where to turn; so we went to Dunkin’ Donuts down the street, and sat in a room filled with leering men and cigar smoke until the sun had started to rise over the sea and we talked each other into going back.

Two days later, safely cocooned on a plane, we told Dwayne what we’d feared from him that night. At first he laughed, but when he realized we were serious and I showed him the cut in my pea coat as proof, he became angry and barely uttered another word.

I spent a majority of those hours in the air writing everything down in my journal. Dwayne spent a majority of his writing a letter to each of us. Right when our plane touched tarmac, Dwayne tossed one of them into my seat.

Once we were driving back to Kentucky and Dwayne was on his way to Birmingham, I read what he’d written. With excellent grammar and penmanship, he accused me of being the ring leader for everything that had happened that night. He warned me that my imagination was too wild; that somebody was bound to get hurt if I didn’t rein it in. He went on and on, and when I finally reached the end and refolded the letter, I stuck it in my coat pocket and felt the slit I’d made in the lining with that paring knife.

I thought of that time as a child when I believed I was almost kidnapped; I thought of that time I thought I had a brain tumor; I thought of that time I believed my neighbor was a stalker; I thought of that time I thought somebody was following me to my dorm; I thought of the time…I thought of the time….

Was Dwayne right? Had my imagination run away with me — run over me — that night we stood freezing under Grecian stars? Did he have nothing in mind but a continuation of the ghost stories we’d told down at the port?

To this day I don’t know if Dwayne’s intentions were harmful or not, but every time I put my orange pea coat on and stuff my hands in the pockets, I can feel that slit I’d made with the paring knife, and it is a warning not to let my imagination become overactive, to not let my imagination run over myself and trample others again.

Even if it would make for an excellent story.