Whenever I look back at my childhood, all my memories from a specific time period are plucked out of my head by an omnipotent hand and all that is left is one small moment. Unfaltering fear. Never-ending laughter. Paramount grief.
When I was about four years old, I went on a trip to Japan with my family. I remember close to nothing about that trip, except for this. This was a moment of terror experienced like no other.
My parents had to drag me into the building. The building was a haunted house. Outside, it appeared completely innocent and safe, but inside was a ferocious monster struggling to break out and destroy. I was already fighting with my parents – kicking, dragging, screaming to express my distaste, but my parents paid me no mind. Into the hungry haunted house I went, and I knew I was never going to come out of there alive.
The inside of the haunted house would have been dark as a bottomless pit if it weren’t for the stained glass windows filtering the sunlight into colorful beams of light. The house looked like it was straight out of a haunted cathedral, with a strange Japanese twist to it. Tiny folded origami birds hung down from the ceiling with invisible strings, small plushies littered the ground in no apparent order, and browned vines wound down the walls. It was an abandoned-house-cathedral. I gripped my parent’s hands tightly and tiptoed my way through this room to the next, leading to what I didn’t know would haunt me forever.
The next room housed a figure of a woman. At first glance, her appearance was that of a typical Japanese woman, with dark hair tied up in a tight bun and a flowery kimono wrapped around her body. But suddenly, a loud hiss echoed across the room and every eye turned to the figure. Slowly but surely, her wrinkly, frail neck began to extend. A once normal woman was now turned into a ghost. Her neck twisted like a coiled snake, hissing as it rose from the body. The head, with horrifying lips painted on a snow-white face, was brought along with it, stretching up thousands and thousands of miles into the sky. Her eyes were as hollow and dark as a hole dug five-hundred feet into the ground. She was a demon straight from the depths of the earth.
Buckets of tears rushed down my cheeks like waterfalls as my eyes focused on the figure and the figure alone. My parents disappeared, the teddy bear in my hand disappeared, I disappeared. All I could see was the wrinkled neck threatening to pounce out and strangle me to death. I thought the neck was going to snap at any moment, and I didn’t want to be there to witness that.
I ripped my teary eyes away from the figure, and ran, fast as lightning, back into my parent’s arms. My mom picked me up and I reveled in the warmth of her embrace as she carried her sobbing child out of the building.
To me, the figure of the woman would never return to normal, the wrinkled neck suspended in the sky forever, held up by the fear of all the children around the world.
This was one small moment of fear that was left behind in my memories. The memories of the entire trip lost, but curiously, this one stayed forever behind.
Writing Process (click for link):
Reflection:
This was one of the easiest but also hardest essays for me to write this semester. This was because the subject was easy to talk about, because it was just like telling a story, but incorporating description and figurative language, I found, was extremely challenging for me. But once I put my mind to it, I felt that it all came naturally. I finished the rough draft, surprisingly, in the one block we were given to write it, while I usually have to work on my writing at home. This is one of the pieces I’m most proud of, and it was the most enjoyable because I had a very vivid memory to base it off of.
Sum Yiu's College Writing Blog 