When I was around 5 I went to my friend's house for a playdate. All was well, we were having fun, as children do.
Our parents were making conversation while my friend and I were playing on the floor with dinosaurs and blocks. The best playthings. I was casually listening to our parents' conversation because they were near by and I was wondering what was going on in the world of adulthood! Little was comprehended, but one sentence stuck out from the others.
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The tree man. Now I dont know what it was about the tree man that frightened me so much, but my imagination went wild and invented the most horribly terrifying creature of my worst nightmares, the bane of childhood existence. It must have looked somewhat like this:
The initial shock was crippling.
Then pure terror set in. I realized that the tree man, an unknown horror 5 minutes before, was coming HERE to my friend's house. I needed to escape
My heart was racing.
I slowly got up. Crippled by fear, i walked over to my unknowing mother.
My mom recently told me that she had never seen such pure fear in my eyes since the tree man. At the time she had no idea what was going through my mind, only that I quietly insisted that we needed to go. Whenever she asked why we needed to go, I would shake my head slowly. I was questioned in the car, my mom would not stop until she had gotten to the bottom of this. I didn't even want to think about him. My worst fear, brought into being. Eventually she got it out of me. The tree man. She almost laughed, I'm not sure if it was in pity, or mockery. This was not a topic to joke about. I believed he was going to eat me.
I didn't sleep for a month.
