The first thing I noticed when walking through the door was the daunting nature the red steps seemed to twist up and around the house, almost choking it. The stairs were intimidating, not only because of how unsturdy they looked, but also because I was exhausted.

Thick black garbage bags sat like stale puffed crËmes outside of the bottom tenants apartment, oozing trash like a raunchy cream filling. The smell was nauseating, but oddly enough faded away as I followed Amy to her apartment on the top floor.

"Who on earth lives there, all the rodents in this state?" I asked her, as my purple tote bag pressed uncomfortably into my thighs with each step.

Amy didn't answer, and the only response I got was the bouncing motion of her hood against her navy sweatshirt as she hopped the stairs two at a time. I pulled back on her hood, jokingly, and she swung around quick, raising her eyebrows sharply and glaring with her green eyes. I stepped back a bit. She almost knocked me off balance, and I put my hand on the banister in an effort to steady myself.

I know the look she has given me well. It is a look that she gave me when she picked me up from the bus station earlier in the evening. The streetlight illuminated her tired face as I stepped off of the Peter Pan bus, and gave it an eery supernatural glow. Her manicured fingers clenched the wheel as if she was holding on for dear life; as if she had nothing else in the world more important to hold on to.

Why did she hold these grudges; clinging on to the past, carrying it like an overstuffed backpack? Her shoulders were so taut that they seemed to be pushing against some invisible force.

We reached the top of the stairs, and the post leaned slightly to the side, chips of the white paint littering the tiled floor. I dropped my bag quickly, and a corner of it brushed the top of Amy's foot. She winced dramatically, pointing her pink toenails in the air daintily.

"I see you haven't changed a bit, Maureen."

"I see you haven't either."

The fact that she used my real name made my stomach feel like it was going through a shredder. Amy only called me Maureen when she was particularly peeved, and I sure didn't like hearing it. It reminded me of mother's monotonous bickering. But Amy could get away with it tonight.

I could hear the muffled sound of the ten o'clock news coming from her neighbors two doors down. She fumbled for her keys, and I picked at a sesame seed stuck in my teeth. The door was the brightest shade of dark green since I've seen Gumby. Plastered in the middle were bold yellow numbers, 201. They reminded me of the Subway logo.

"So, does walking in here guarantee me to lose six pounds, or should I assume your motto isn't quite as pleasing as the fast food chain?" I said, grinning.

Amy's mouth turned up slightly, as if both sides of her face were having a battle over which expression could show.

"If you're relying on my cooking expertise, you might have no choice," she said, pushing the door open. We walked in and I threw the bag in the dark. It landed with a thud against the mail table, which shook as the light from the hall made it seem like some cheap special effect in a haunted house.

She did have a point about her cooking. "In that case, I'll stick to the Subway sandwiches."

She laughed finally, a short little laugh, and it sounded forced. But I couldn't blame her. I flipped the light switch on and winced from the contrast to the hall lighting. You would think that the lime green and sky blue striped loveseat we had in the house for years would look charming in my sister's apartment, but it was just as gaudy as everything else. Including the red denim jeans I was wearing. And me sitting on the aforementioned loveseat? Well, I looked like a psychedelic easter-egg. After the stop at McDonald's in Hartford, I felt as round as one too. The cushions were worn and smelled of Febreeze and that day- in and day -out odor furniture acquires over the years. I laid back and buried my nose in the pillow and my boots in the far cushion.

Amy was running around the room frantically, trying to tidy up. It was clear that she had left the house in a hurry to come get me. A half-eaten bowl of withered salad sat on the coffee table, and a tipped over Poland Springs bottle. She scooped both of them up and threw them on the kitchen counter. She does this often; moving the clutter from one place to another, so that it never gets better but just shifts location.

"There is nothing to fear but fear itself." Franklin D. Roosevelt

When the breeze had settled, the leaves were completely still on the stiff branches. The dark soil, covered by a thin layer of red and orange dried leaves, was as brittle as a cracker. No yielding underfoot. No mud to leave tread marks in. No giving of the earth. Just a hard crunch; the leaves crushing on top of the almost frozen ground, the colors mingling and spewed with dirt. Above, the gray sky. Below, pools of rain water iced over delicately, so that if you were to place an ant on it it would slip and slide, but a finger would sink below it.

Then the wind picks up again, wraps its tentacles around the late afternoon, pulls at it, compresses it, so that anything touched by the wind feels its chilled force seep through it, and even the trees thick physique doesn't stop them from shivering their old gnarled arms in the crisp air.

And I, I was lost somewhere between the roar in my ears and the silence when it faded away.

Ancraophobia- fear of wind. Barophobia- fear of gravity. Chronophobia- fear of time. Dementophobia- fear of insanity. Epistemophobia- fear of knowledge. Francophobia- fear of France. Geniophobia- fear of chins. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia- fear of long words. Isolophobia- fear of being alone. Japanophobia- fear of the Japanese. Katagelophobia- fear of ridicule. Lachanophobia-fear of vegetables.

Mr. Thomas Weishaus stands in front of the Holocaust class, his back stooped but his head held high. It is a typical November afternoon but a not so typical situation. The Holocaust survivor has come to share with the class his experience of being a Jew in Budapest during World War II. His face is animated as he talks; energy seeps out of him and transfers to the students, who lean forward in their seats, eyes transfixed, hands propped on chins.

He has no fear in his voice as he tells them about his narrow escape from the Hungarian thugs who crowded around the Jews waiting in line at the bakery, surrounding them like a swarm of mosquitoes. A bomb dropped and shattered the window that he leapt through to get away. Hours later, he crept back to the bakery and found his bread made for him, and then went back to his Swedish protected safehouse. He survived by a narrow chance of luck.

His voice is emotional and lighthearted and sad at the same time.

"That period of do or dieÖ I can not measure up to it," he says.

The fear nourished him. The adrenaline motivated him. He survived.

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself," Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Standing on the diving board. Looking down into the glimmering surface of the overly chlorinated water. Sitting down on the edge, dipping toes in, testing the temperature. A shock up the leg, the frozen water standing the soft hair up until it's as prickly as a porcupine. The kids in the shallow end "whoop" and "hoorah", hitting each other with foam noodles and paddling back and forth on kickboards. Their sounds echo down the eternal length to the deep end of the indoor pool. I want to jump, but it seems too difficult to do, a string dangling in front of my nose that gets wrapped around my hands instead of being easily grasped. I close my eyes. One, two, threeÖthree and a halfÖthree and three quartersÖ and I'm under! The roaring quietness fills my ears instantly, and my feet touch the cold cement bottom. I wave my legs wildly, and an intense, desperate move makes me reach, reach for the top.

Waiting for a phone call, a letter, a validation of love. Staring at the computer screen for hours and hours and watching the cursor mock your blinking, fading in and out and in and out in a steady rhythm, and wondering if you can ever get a sentence out that will be as beautiful as Whitman's poetry or if you will fade into oblivion, just another wannabe writer drinking excessive cups of coffee and staying up at all hours of the night and plastered to a pendulum of passion and poor-judgement.

Mysophobia-fear of dirt. Nebulaphobia- fear of the fog. Olfactophobia- fear of smells. Phobophobia- fear of phobias. Q- Question?. Rhytiphobia- fear of getting wrinkles. Siderophobia - Fear of the stars. Tyrannophobia - fear of tyrants Uranophobia - fear of heaven. Vitricophobia - fear of stepfathers. Wicaphobia - fear of witches and witchcraft. Xerophobia - fear of dryness. Y- Yes, Nothing. Zelophobia -fear of jealousy.

My stepfather's boots echo maliciously on the thin wooden floor above me. There is constant sound generated by his movements. The floor trembles mutely beneath me, and I look down. Maybe it's just my legs. I place my long-fingered hands on the top of the washing machine as it goes through the spin cycle to steady myself. Whoooshawhooshawhooshawhoosha. The machine gurgles along with my stomach.

As a kid, my cousins and I used to "hide" under the dining room table at our grandparents house. There never was enough space and we'd always bump our heads or our elbows on each other or the hard wood, but we didn't mind. The tiny area under the table was hidden by the tablecloth, and so we found it easy to imaginatively transport ourselves to another world and time. On the other side of us, the family would be chatting noisily about the latest movie in the theatre, and my grandfather would be in his chair, watching tv or sleeping. In our little fort, we were able to go anywhere we desired. We could be pirates, unicorns, warriors, or simply regular adults going for a leisurely drive in the country side. I was good at the power of believing and being. I thirsted for it, and drank of it from a plentiful source.

So why did it go away? Why was I creatively dehydrated during my teenage years, living in this godforsaken house with my stepfather and mother, becoming hardboiled from the monotonous brooding and relentless indecisions that had become ingrained in my nature? I feared the emotional dents in my wood would be there forever, as visible as Johnny loves Tricia scratched into a desk in a classroom, penned over by the students who sit there afterwards, made more visible and bold from boredom and needing a distraction.

Was I using Jim, with his dirt-stained boots and camouflage hunting outfits, his heated temper that I could set off quicker than any mishandled fireworks, as an excuse for my unhappiness?

At what point do you let your unhappiness define you and at what point do you say enough is enough and move on?

You move on when you need to. When you've hit rock bottom. When there's no choice but climbing back up again. Even when you move away, the pain is still there until you alleviate it with new experiences.

Yesterday I returned to my grandparents' house, an older version of the girl who had stood shaking as jerkily as the washing machine at the sound of my stepfather's presence. I sat in the chair next to him, exchanging polite but curt exchanges since we were forced to be cordial for Thanksgiving.

I think we exchanged two sentences in the two hours we were around each other.

Behind us, the old dining room table I used to play under seemed miniature, like it belonged in a dolls house. I had left the doll house, like Ibsen wrote about in his famous play. Now the world was real and vivid and mine for the taking instead of him taking it from me.

It's ironic that we fear change, but we fear repetition as well. Sometimes it's as if life has gotten stuck on the same track, playing it over and over until you are sick of the same song and can't bear the same words, patterns, tones, and changes in rhythm.

Maybe John Cusack had it right in the movie High Fidelity when he said "What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"

Maybe we're just playing the wrong music to begin with. Maybe we need to create a soundtrack that celebrates our life instead of condemning it.

Most of all, maybe we need to listen to the wind, and let its chilled hands seep through us, instead of shrinking back from it.

Maybe we're just afraid of being misunderstood. It's time to take the mask off of fear and stare into its cold sunken eyes, its dark shrewd vastness, directly in the face. Fear is our own individual creation. Phobias can debilitate us. Hesitation can destabilize us. But it can protect us as well, until we are ready to confront the wind or we are forced to. Fear makes our choices for us.

Sometimes they are critical decisions, sometimes they are trivial. But one thing is for certain. The power of decision is a gift, and should make us fear nothing. Not even the roar of the biting wind.

"The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind." Bob Dylan.