sorcyress | (no subject)

What you don't realize, is that everyone has a personal horror.

Everyone. Every man and woman and child has a theoretical thing, that belongs to them and only them. Maybe they can describe it, maybe they can't. Maybe they don't even realize it's there, just on the edge of reality, always watchingwatchingwaiting for them to slip up.

You may be scared of all kinds of things, or none at all, but that doesn't mean jack shit when it comes to your horror. It's not spiders or clowns or a monster under your bed so much as a presence, that lives behind your shoulder -just there!- and watches.

Maybe it wouldn't be as bad if it didn't watch. Maybe it wouldn't matter, if just one dark night, when you're all by yourself, the horror swept out from nowhere and used its hands and teeth and presence to hurt you in ways you didn't know you could be hurt, kill you in ways you didn't know humans could die.

But it does watch. It watches you every day and every night. Have you ever felt it? Unease at a darkened room? Uncertainty as you rounded a corner? Fear as you run up the stairs, a temptation to flatten your back to the wall and turn on every light in the house?

It watches, and somehow, sometimes, we just know. We Know, completely and fully that it is there, and that it's just waiting for it to be strong enough, us to be scared enough.

Just waiting.

Watching, watching, and waiting. Right behind your back.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yeah. i totally know.

The idle thoughts you ponder in the evening
become monsters who eat your soul up in one bite

And there's no one left to love you and no one to hold you tight

Good Night, Sweet Dreams, Good Night

There's a roleplaying game called "Unknown Armies" that codifies a person's most intimate horror. They call it the "fear stimulus".

/geek

Humans evolved from mammals that were frequently pray. Everything else was out to kill us. And since we're fairly standard example of a great ape, we're often out to kill each other also. Overactive fear responses make sense in that context. Of course, having a rational understanding of this doesn't stop things from being damn scary. The often preachy but still sometimes funny webcomic Cectic had an old strip about this: http://cectic.com/032.html

Horror.
just beyond my vision
a form resides
and in any empty moment
I know I'm not quite alone
and almost see him
waiting there
waiting for me to look too hard
or not quite hard enough
and taste insanity.

Did you know that my greatest phobia is of hallucination? Especially visual, and especially of a human figure.

Love,
Herbert.

I know it. I have survived it. It demands a terrible toll when it catches you. Some survive, others go on in a crippled half state.

And so it goes.

*hums the twilight theme*