What Sounds May Come

Have you ever noticed how a second of fear can bring you through an entire life time within a moment?

Tonight I was sitting on the couch and as usual had fallen asleep with my hands on the keys of the laptop. My girls always wake me laughing, but this time the sound of what I believed to be glass breaking startled me and for a brief moment I had slipped into the past and thought I was in the upstairs bedroom of the apartment my two older daughters and I had shared with a cousin. The fear made my heart skip so hard that I thought it would crack and stop. It was the exact feeling I had felt that particular night when the neighbor next door had tried to break into the kitchen window. There I was, home without a telephone with two little girls under five years old sleeping next to me. I was so afraid. All I could think was that I had to get us out of the apartment, but knew I couldn't go down the stairs.

Moving quickly, I pushed the dresser against the door and ran to open the window. My first thought was, what? Do we fly? It looked so far down but I sure thought about wrapping the girls in the comforter and tossing them out of the window when I noticed two guys walking across the courtyard. To make a long story short, the guys let me know the person trying to break in was stopped by his parents and the police were downstairs. He turned out to have mental issues and thought my cousin and I were always talking about him on Oprah. Funny, I wish I had the chance to be on Oprah. Even funnier is the fact that no glass had even been broken tonight and I had heard the air conditioner kick on. I need to go to bed.