Living on your own is life’s biggest paradox. The calm and quiet is so addicting, yet those crackling sounds at night are way too frightening to deal with alone.

 

Imagine you’re laying in your bed and you hear a noise from another ZIP code, yet somehow it feels as if it’s coming right from the inside of your house. In the unexpected anticipation you prop your body halfway up, face frozen, eyes bulging out and blood rushing to parts of your body you didn’t know needed blood in them. You’re now sitting there looking like a deer in headlights and a weak prey looking to escape its predator at any second now.

 

Meanwhile, the thoughts in your head are rushing to you quicker than you can react. You’re now wishing you had someone else there so you can use them as a human shield in case those Bigfoot stories turn out real. But who needs a human shield, when you have the power of walking around naked. That’s right, being naked is mankind’s oldest confidence booster. It’s our natural state. It’s our dwindling livelihood. It’s our defense mechanism against outside threats. 

 

So you pursue that logic. As you jump out of bed, many parts of you start to jiggle unnecessarily, and rather than confidence and powerfulness, you are now feeling vulnerable and intimidated. You are assured by those feelings when you look down on the masterpiece of a body you have. You can’t help but wonder, ‘damn, I don’t wanna die looking like this. What if my mom had to identify me? Worse, what if my crush saw the news and now they’re glad I’m dead looking like that?’

 

You can imagine the savage headlines the next morning: “lonely person dies naked of an induced heart attack from fear of imagining noises.” It’s shameful, yet a worthy headline story. 

Now you can only convince yourself that the noises were not, indeed, coming from the inside of your house, but rather they are the sad imagination of your own lonely life. 

 

So you get back in bed under the covers where you know that’s the shield against all bad and evil out there. You snuggle yourself up and decide to pass out from all this self induced fear you keep injecting yourself with. And tomorrow night… Well, tomorrow night will have to deal with tomorrow night. Tonight, however, you are safe under the covers, which can shield you from the dangers of the atomic bomb, as well as the fear of the unknown of the night crackles.