Horror Stories Aren't Real

It's almost midnight. Outside the sky is gray, and there is a chill in the air. An icy breeze rustles the leaves breaking the otherwise silent background. The house is empty and stillness looms in every corner. The only lights seen are the glow from a computer and the hall light in the next room. Suddenly, those too turn to darkness.

This is the scene before me last night as my mind had to constantly remember that Horror Stories are generally not true in the west side of Lubbock, Texas. I was home alone for the evening and had a good test before me of how I'm going to do living alone come here in a week. Thankfully, I did better than I thought I would. As my life plunged into darkness I was grateful for my in-reach candle lighter and candles. I felt like I had jumped into the 18th century as I walked around my house with a candle in hand before I found our handy flashlight. Then with flashlight under my arm and a more abundance of light, I ignored scary thoughts that included "what if it's the same person that broke in over Christmas?" and stepped outside to check the breaker box. Nothing wrong was there. I prayed there wasn't a person that had now slipped into my house, and faux confidently checked the front to see if my neighbors had light. The people across the street did, and the house 2 doors down did, but not those around me. Again I pushed back scary thoughts, was grateful for my decision to not watch horror movies and pulled out a phone book. I made a couple of phone calls and after checking with my roommate for who our power company was, I was SO grateful to see they had a 24 hour emergency number.

The potential horror story plot being created in my head was eliminated as the lady on the phone informed me someone had hit a electricity pole. It could be hours or tomorrow before it was fixed. That was a relief, but the quickly warming home and reality of still being alone in a dark house for potentially the evening was too much for me to want to stay in that predicament. Off to play sleep over with some friends it was! Within 15 minutes my rescue vehicle arrived (my car was stuck in our garage as I couldn't manually open it without the key, and I had no idea where it was.)

So what had the potential of creating dramatic, overwhelmed tears of fear actually was faced with slightly freaked out, but overall calm, logical action steps to figure out what had happened and what to do next. One bedroom, apartment living here I come!!!