Let me tell you about a phobia I have: swamps and marshes. It seems like they could never haunt me if I chose not to visit them, but I am absolutely traumatized by the thought that disgusting creatures such as frogs and alligators could be living in the murky waters. In my darkest nightmare, I gained consciousness to dark greenness, and suddenly my vision became clear to submergence in the marshes. I was way submerged under the creamy, rotten green film at the surface of the water, and it seemed that the water around me was semi-translucent, but pervaded with darkness. It was strange, since the water was so thick it felt like I was floating through the water, slowly upwards towards the surface. I pressed my lips together as hard as I could so that more of the grimy water wouldn’t enter my mouth, and I wouldn’t have to endure the unbearable taste of grime, dirt, mud, and some slime that had some firmness. A creepy sensation came over me; I began to have chills after I felt a small something creeping on my right shoulder. My eyes were slightly opened; I’m Chinese, and my eyes are very narrow, but I felt that I had to open them wider to see the live creature tickling viciously on my shoulder. It was a frog. When I detected the creature, I squirmed helplessly in the water, hoping that if I thrashed my arms around and kicked harder, the slimy little frog, literally my least favorite animal, would fall off. Did I need to use my hands? I tried to grab at the little frog, but it seemed that it wanted to latch on harder with its webbed forearms and feet. It was a dilemma, the frog was climbing up my neck now, but I couldn’t see it anymore with my eyes. My eyes were getting very tired and creating a thick film over the eyeball because of the filth and murkiness of the swamp’s waters. But when I actually opened my eyes, it was just a dream. My brain was haunting me because I had been traumatized by my field trip in the marshes. We were walking on the trail and there was shrubbery around the waters, but my friend just wanted to feed me to the alligators. It was the most terrifying experience of my life, and my friend got expelled for what he did. I was following everyone at the back of the line, looking at my phone, when my friend started laughing. He saw the scales of a couple of alligators and their humps poking out the water, just a little, and not even their eyes were above the surface. The trail had many twists and turns, but I was able to follow the line by staying close behind everyone’s footsteps. Suddenly, when there was a lack of shrubbery near the edge of the water, my ex-friend pushed me. Next thing I knew, I fell face forwards into the marshes. My face was trapped in the mud, and this was a muddy base of very shallow waters. I couldn’t breathe being trapped in the muddy bottoms, and suddenly I realized that the waters were very shallow at the edge of the swamp. The back of my head was dry and above ground. Because my face was entirely submerged, the yelling and shouts of my classmates were extremely muffled, and I couldn’t scream for help. This was an active conundrum: I was actually in the worst panic of my entire life because my eyes started hurting badly after the sediment and filth started infecting it and there were some miniscule rocks chafing in my eye. All I could taste was thick paste of grime and small bitter tasting minerals. I tried to determine a way to spit out the tiny tiny rocks in my mouth. I tried to create a propulsion in my mouth, but not being able to breathe, and oh yeah, starting to lose breath, I couldn’t spit the rocks in my mouth out. They’d just somehow drifted into my mouth with the underwater currents. With the panic and desperation I was in, I was violently trying to reach my hands out of the water forwards, but no one could reach me. I thought, why is my head hurting so badly, but I realized that the pain was on the outside of my head. It was alligator teeth, first clamping down on the back of my head, the part that was above water, and later, the teeth started scraping the bottom of my nose, and cutting into the cartilage when its chomp was starting to close. Luckily, before anything else happened, meaning that the pain and unbearable sensation of drowning would get even worse, someone pulled me up and out of the water by grabbing the hair on the back of my head, it’s such a wonderful thing that I left a ponytail even though I get bullied for it all the time (I’m a boy). My face, as my classmates told it, was solid red and covered with filth, and my eyes were bloodshot. Because I was suddenly able to gasp for air, I couldn’t even scream or sob or do anything to relieve the unimaginable fast rate at which my heart was pounding. This was so shocking that I didn’t know which way my body was oriented, and I couldn’t even feel my arms or legs. Someone was pouring water from a plastic bottle into my eyes, and through the stream of water I could see the sky. I was choking with emotion and just sounded like coughs and sputtering like a fountain directed towards the clouds.
I'd dare say that I was beaten by my phobia. Screwed over by my friend, that is. New phobia unlocked in the classroom.
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