365 Days (Part 1) | ✓

25. Fear

26. Fear: What scares you a little? What do you feel when scared? How do you react?

My biggest fear is geckos. I kidd you not.

There's a reason behind this. I briefly alluded to this problem yesterday, and some of you may have taken it as a joke. It is not a joke. It is very serious. Geckos terrify me and I cannot. I just cannot.

Technically, this is called batrachophobia, or fear or reptiles. Mine is a bit narrower, though I certainly don't care at all for similar monstrosities. The funny thing is, I don't even mind other lizards. Bring on the komodo dragons, just don't let me be within fifteen feet of a gecko.

The story behind this goes way back into the bowls of history -- back when I was a young child and I decided I liked cats. Then my cats decided they liked me. Anyone who has a cat or who has ever been in contact with a cat or has ever heard word the "cat" knows this is a true accomplishment, ranking among such discoveries as Ernest Rutherford's atomic model.

Cats show their love in strange ways. I am quite serious when I say I love them -- I wanted a year's worth of subscriptions to Catster magazine (formerly Cat Fancy) for Christmas. Sadly, that was one dream that was never realized. However, I have read, in the course of my life, several articles about their behavior and what it means. With this knowledge, I know that my cats basically regard me as a hairless and incompetent fellow-cat who they feel the need to hunt for so that I won't die. When a cat actively doesn't want you to die... that's pretty much the highest form of affection that can be reached. Their desire to preserve my life led them to leave me "gifts" of food.

They would bring me geckos.

I was kind of a squeamish child. Hopefully I have since gotten over most of that nonsense, but when I was a little girl geckos were quite literally my worst nightmare. Especially since my cats suddenly decided to be vampires and suck all of the blood out of the gecko body before leaving it for me to find on my bedroom floor. I would be playing with dolls, when suddenly I noticed something... I would get up to look and shriek. The sight of a shriveled lizard wih beady black eyes and a pale, transparent body tends to do that to a girl.

That is what I find most disturbing about these terrible creatures: That you can see through them. You can even see the red lines of their veins. My skin is crawling just thinking about it.

Then I would run downstairs, still making inarticulate noises of fear and disgust, and demand that my dad or some other volunteer remove the gecko from my bedroom or I would be moving out.

The gecko would be disposed of and then I would do a cautious inspection of my room, just in case there were more. It would be at least a week before I would feel safe in my room again.

Once, I was sitting on my bed doing devotions, and I heard an odd chewing sound. I got this feeling of dread, like I wanted to be paralyzed, but I looked to discover the source without thinking. My cat Boogie (who was a bit insane) looked up at me, a mutilated gecko between his paws and a long gecko tale hanging from his mouth. I am scarred forever.

They are just so disturbing! Luckily I was not around to see this, but just hearing about it was enough to make me shiver. My mom was coming into the house late at night and shut the door. She hadn't realized at the exact moment a gecko was trying to come in. Basically, she chopped the thing in half.

That's pretty terrible, right? It gets worse.

So there's this disembodied gecko tail, and you would think that would be the end of its life. You were wrong. That gecko tale (and part of the gecko body too), flopped around the kitchen on its own for about a minute or so, completely independent of its body. I'm not really sure how, if the gecko was coming in and got split in half, the tail part ended up inside. Mom looked for the head and the rest of the body but didn't find it that night. The next morning it was discovered in another room. My cats had gotten to it.

Pretty recently, there was a gecko in our gameroom that kept coming out to cling to the walls each night. In the day it hid only God knows where, but at night it would crawl up high on the wall, where my cats couldn't get to it. I wasn't brave enough to knock it down with a broom and other people didn't care about it. This particular gecko, who was so large I nicknamed him "Big Mama," was a recurring visitor for a week. It was a major ordeal for me to have to enter the gameroom.

One night, I didn't see it. I was kind of freaking out. It was worse not knowing its location than knowing it. Eventually I gave up and went into my bathroom to take a shower. I had just finished using the toilet when I saw a thin little gecko on the floor behind the potty.

"I found it!" I screamed, racing out of the bathroom.

My parents, happily watching The Big Bang Theory downstairs. and away from all unsavory lizards, merely laughed.

"Get rid of it," my mom said like her batrachophobic daughter wouldn't die from such a thing.

It seemed impossible. I needed a shower. The gecko was in the bathroom. I was terrified.

It took me thirty minutes, the help of two very unhelpful cats, the broom, and a trashcan. At the end of those thirty minutes of violent warfare, my dad trudged up the stairs, picked up the gecko (with much eye-rolling), and got rid of it.

The good news? I got my shower. The bad news? The little gecko in my bathroom wasn't even Big Mama! Big Mama was still in the gameroom after that!

I have one last story to tell. (I am very passionate about geckos and how horrific they are.) This is the real reason why I have this phobia. It is also one of my worst memories.

I was maybe eleven. Maybe my cats thought I was getting too scrawny, because they left me some geckos. Note the plural. Not just one, but two geckos. The first they left on the floor like normal. But the second?

Sometimes I hate my cats as much as I love them.

The second gecko they left on top of me while I was sleeping.

I don't know how long it was there. I could have slept with a gecko for all I know... sleeping with the enemy.

When I woke up and sat up, I felt something hanging from my nightgown. I instinctively looked down to see what it was.

Do you ever get that half-second of dread before something bad happens? I got that. But it wasn't quick enough to warn me of the dried up lizard clinging to my side, black eyes staring.

I FREAKED.

I was screaming and calling for my brother Zachary to help (since he was nearest). I was happy to find out that when I screamed for help like I was being hacked to death with a samurai sword, no one cared or showed the slightest interest. Zachary kept right on playing his video games. When I ran downstairs, and related my harrowing escape from the gecko, Mom casually commented, "Oh, I thought Zachary was waking you up in a rude way again."

Like, what?