I am twenty-two years old and scared of the dark.

     This is what I think when I’m in bed and sleep begins to look less and less likely. I’ve read that if sleep doesn’t take hold after so many minutes the best thing to do is to get up, read a book or watch TV, feign indifference. But after putting so much time into trying to fall asleep I get stubborn. I try to convince myself that if I only wait a few minutes more, it will happen; I’ll fall asleep.

     But I won’t, of course.

     Halfway through my vacation, I’ve been here almost a week and it’s the same thing every night. My parents don’t know that I haven’t been sleeping. I’d be too embarrassed to tell them why. My first night home I stayed up late watching TV. I knew I had to go to bed at some point, but I felt anxious. I stared out of my bedroom window at the woods and they stared back at me. Everything else was asleep.

    In my old bedroom in my parents’ house there is a long chintz curtain that hangs over the window and a vent along the floor directly underneath. During the night the curtain comes to life, demurely shrugs and swings, looks like a ghost. The glow from the Christmas lights along the roof push quietly against the window.

     The house is in the middle of nowhere. They’ve lived here my whole life, but the middle of nowhere-ness seems more pronounced now that I’m used to the city. In front of the house is a rock road lined with pine trees; it twists and turns so you can’t see the main road from it. The woods surround the house. With the moonlight there is the black of the night sky and the black of the winter trees and a crosshatched black where the two meet. Without the moon there isn’t anything at all, no weight or depth, just an uninterrupted black, like being in the stomach of a wild animal. Some people think this is comfortable, a dark blanket to wrap yourself in, that the thunderous silence is restful. In stories and movies people always want to move to the country: wouldn’t it be so charming, so relaxing, they say, if we could just get away from it all?

     My parents live in the country. Or what used to be the country, anyway. I don’t know how to describe this area anymore. It’s an in-between place, caught up in the continual process of defacement, the clearing away of hills and valleys and woods that are replaced with houses that don’t tell you anything about the inhabitants or the area. They are strange, faceless houses; I don’t know who lives in them. Whenever I come home the area looks less and less like I remember. Some new subdivision will have appeared during my absence but I won’t remember what was there before. Maybe it’s partially because nothing was there before, but the thing is, I can’t even remember what sort of nothing it was, what it looked like.

     Even at eleven years old, I was scared of the dark. Eleven seemed too old for that kind of kid stuff, wasn’t it? I know it now like I knew it then, and I  am embarrassed. The view from my room is the same as it’s always been. I can see the edge of the woods along the edge of the backyard, the bare tree branches reaching up into the sky like bony fingers. What’s in the woods? The question makes me uneasy. It’s like wondering about the germs in your house that you can’t see or ghosts who linger without making their presence known. When I stare out the window I think about things I haven’t thought about in a long time, childhood things that come from re-inhabiting a childhood space.

     The dark, the woods, it’s childish, this fear. There’s no explanation for it, no rationality, it’s not like the adult fear of aging or illness or being alone. But aren’t fears defense mechanisms, aren’t they normal and instinctive, can’t they protect us, keep us from getting hurt? When I stare out the window it’s like staring into an attic or a basement or a closet with no light, there is a familiarity and fullness I can feel but can’t see.

     But what is out there that could hurt me?

     The woods are where the rules change, where all bets are off. They’re where things happen-- just read any fairytale or Shakespeare play. Sometimes they’re called something else: “forest” makes them sound romantic, magical, “the wilderness,” raw and exciting. But “the woods” -- there is something about the phrase that seems vague and ominous.

     I found out after I left for college that in other places the wooded areas have names, but they’re ones that have a beginning and an end, where they’re incidental or controlled, and the boundaries have been clearly marked with buildings or roads. You don’t name something that’s everywhere.

     I can see trees from my apartment window too; the bedroom faces the park. But those trees are different from the ones here. You can see into and around and through them. They’re not hiding anything.

     I was eleven when things changed. I mean the woods changed or I did. It was summer when it happened, and I had spent the afternoon looking for fossils near the creek. That night after I’d gotten home, after we’d eaten dinner, helicopters circled over the woods, dropped searchlights into the darkness. We knew something was wrong but didn’t find out until the next day what had happened. A man had died. He had been known for his habit of exploring, had disappeared into one of the local caves in the woods, had fallen and hit his head. A strange, rural, wild death.

     Even though he was our neighbor we didn’t really know him very well. In movies and TV shows and fiction, people who live in small towns are cozy, friendly, but it’s never been like that here. Here people keep to themselves, as if one of the main attractions of the area is the privacy it affords, the distance. 

     After that I didn’t feel like going into the woods. They seemed different, secretive and watchful. I began to watch them carefully. At night I had nightmares. Sometimes I was the person in the dream but other times it was him, and then sometimes it was me but I was him and I was, or he was, or we were tumbling and tumbling like Alice down the rabbit hole without ever reaching the bottom.

     There are plenty of horror movies about nightmares but they’re never very scary. The characters in them dream of murderers and monsters and the supernatural; they dream about things that could never possibly hurt them in real life.

     I didn’t tell my parents about it. I didn’t tell them but they found out anyway; they could tell I wasn’t sleeping well, that something had changed. It’s the woods, I told them. They didn’t understand. They hugged me and said, “Don’t be silly, they’ve always been there, there’s nothing to worry about. Living here is safer than living in the city.” 

     A week and a half is a long time for a vacation, very generous, I know. I know because I’ve been told more than once how lucky I am, how rare it is, especially for someone at their first grown-up job, who’s had it for less than a year. The people who have told me this are adults significantly older than me. The way they say it you’d think they relish being the bearer of bad news, that it’s their duty to inform me of how being an adult works, which as far as I can tell, seems to be a pretty dreary existence if one of the few perks is scaring youth such as myself about adulthood.

     But my relatives are proud of me, some a bit envious, maybe. I am young, independent, I have a good job and good friends, and I live in a good apartment in a good city. There is nothing to want, nothing to look for. There is nothing to be upset about, to be scared of.

     But it’s strange. When you’re a kid you spend so much time thinking about what it’ll be like to be grown up and then you get there and it’s kind of like this joke you can’t believe you fell for; you can’t believe that no one told you, no one warned you. I went to a good college, which they say makes a difference, but there are certain things college doesn’t prepare you for: certainly not for getting up on time or sitting at a desk in an eight-hour stupor, five days a week.

     But things could be worse. I tell myself this sometimes and then the statement lingers uncertainly, as if I’m not sure if it’s supposed to cheer me up. It’s strange how you can spend your entire life working toward something, toward high school and college and post-college life and you can succeed every step of the way and then you’re done and you’re not sure what to work toward next. On TV and in movies people ask each other how to know if you’re in love. Usually when someone asks this question they’re given the unsatisfying, cryptic answer, you just know, which is exactly what my friend D. said to me when I asked her how to know if you’re depressed. She laughed, not mean-spiritedly, but because she would know, she has known; she sees a psychiatrist, she takes medication. She knows. She shook her head and smiled and said, “Just trust me, you’d know.” Her smile seemed to say that I’d asked a naïve question, like I couldn’t possibly be what I worried I was if I had to ask, if there was any doubt.

     When I am in bed at home – at home in my apartment, I mean – sometimes I can feel it spreading over me like a blanket, dulling my senses. Sometimes I play a game with it, I tell myself that I have to act fast, quickly fall asleep before it can get to me. S. used to joke that I was only spoiled, that this is the plight of the privileged and successful, to have the time and resources to worry, to look for disappointment. He said that I was only looking for trouble, that to be happy I needed to be a little sad. I got angry when he said this. He said that my reaction only proved his point.

     When you’re a kid and you’re scared of something you imagine that adults are invincible, like superheroes. And then when you finally become an adult you wish you could take it back, you wish your biggest fears were still about things like getting braces and what was underneath your bed.

     While lying in bed yesterday morning I listened to my parents talking over breakfast, discussing the woods along the backyard and how they’d been sold and bought, how they’ll be cleared in the next few months for a new subdivision. The next time I visit there will be more of those strange, faceless houses, and I won’t remember what the woods looked like.