Monophobia

Being alone makes you incredibly anxious.

Especially when it's dark.

And there's someone out your office window.

This man didn't seem quite right. He didn't move, he didn't speak. He just stood there and stared. He seemed to stare into your very soul.

You decide that it's probably time to call a friend by now, so you take your eyes off of the man in the window for a split second to locate your phone. There is a knock.

The knock is on your window. The man is smiling now, but he still does not move. Just smiles from a distance at you through your office window.

You really don't want to be alone, but you especially don't want to be alone with this strange man that keeps staring at you as if you're his next meal.

You suddenly feel a pang of fear. The smile that man is giving is certainly not a pleasant one to look at, but at least he's smiling instead of just standing there, looking blank. Now you at least have something to judge him off of.

Creep. You can't help but think as you take your eyes off of him just for another moment and check your contacts to make sure you were getting Sylvia on the phone. You looked back up as the phone rang, and now, as if the man could have heard your thought, he was no longer smiling.

He was smiling strangely now. Somehow, this new smile was scarier than the last. He looked like he was ready to murder someone. You bring your phone up to your ear and hear it pick up.

Static. Either Sylvia was watching a salt-and-pepper fight on her centuries-old T.V. or something had interrupted the signal on her phone. You guess that it was probably the latter, since you hadn't taken your eyes off the man and hadn't seen him move an inch, yet you somehow knew that it was him.

"Hello there, would you like to come out and play a game? I know you're feeling lonely, and I'd just hate for you to feel lonely."

You know that it was him. There's simply just no way that it wasn't.

Perhaps you should just communicate with him through the phone. "You know, I'm feeling a little busy right now. Maybe later we can hang out. I just need to work and then sleep, then maybe have a few hundred schizophrenia pills."

You made the mistake of blinking. When you saw him outside the window again, he was two inches closer to the house. And now he was frowning angrily.

"You refuse my offer? All that I wanted was for you to have a break. You seem to overwork yourself, Emma." You shudder as you hear your beautiful name cut through the static to be clear as day. "Oh, I'm sorry, I was being rude, wasn't I? Is staring at someone through their window their whole life considered rude?

You can't feel your legs. You can hardly breathe. You realise that you don't want to breathe.

Thirty seconds later you remember that it's probably a pretty good idea to breathe, even if you didn't want to. You were curious as to what would happen next, what he would say. Why were you so curious that it got you into trouble?

You always found a way to make trouble. It was one of the many horrible consequences of your existence. You got yourself into things that you can't get out of without hurting somebody, even if that happened to be you or your younger siblings.

But recently you had moved away from them.

And you were apparently having a sick joke played on you by god.

"Fuck you, God!" You whisper under your breath and continue the staring contest. You had a good guess at which one was more likely to fall asleep with their eyes open and knew that it would have been you.

You decide that it's probably best to give him some room, or giving yourself the room, it didn't matter. What did matter though, was the ones that you talk about in your free time.

The reaction time that it took for you to automatically notice that something was missing about the sitting cars was astounding to you in it's own weird way. They seemed to need to contain one last person with them. That person being you.

All that you wanted to do was not to be alone with a stranger.

But when you were being stared down by them, they could make incredibly fast movements, and you simply could not, no matter how much you jogged. You could already tell that it would probably catch a black belt in Karate and was up against someone who was extremely good at Taekwondo.

You couldn't shake the feeling that this was almost definitely something like a shadow creeping up on you. The rules seemed simple enough to you. Don't blink, or you'll miss it. You chuckle at your own terribly dark joke.

When did you find the motivation to have no motivation, anyway?

You realised with a jolt that you had closed your eyes to think. Looking out your window, you could see him. Closer than ever before. You suddenly felt everything go white wash cold. Then you had the strangest of feelings. You felt no time passing, and the world around you felt as if everything and nothing was happening at the same time.

You realised that you had dissociated. But you had never dissociated like this before, where there was no perception of time and just blackness surrounding.

A steady rapping on your window brought you back to reality, and the man was there, but not on the inside of the house anymore. This man was like a shadow, but you knew that he couldn't be one.

If he was rapping on your window, he had to be real.

Perhaps you shouldn't reference him as a 'he' but rather an 'it'.

It didn't care about only moving when you weren't looking anymore. It approached you fearlessly, mirthlessly.

You were scared.

You knew that you didn't want to die.

It looked like it didn't care for that information.