A touching point
The boy was afraid of lizards. Nothing scared him more. The very thought—god forbid, sight — of the treacherous creature petrified him to his core. He doesn’t remember what brought upon him this incurable existential crisis. According to his mother, somebody played a prank on him when he was one year old by flinging a dead hatchling. And the stains of that act has refused to leave his psyche.
A lot of things have changed since that fateful day. Except his repulsion for the tailed ones.
Strange as it is, he doesn’t hate those slimy wallflowers. He just doesn’t want to share a room with them. Not too much to ask for, is it? Turns out, in a city, especially during summer time, it is. Anyway, he harbors no desire to kill them. Which, again, is strange because he loves murdering mosquitoes. By the dear arithmetic of predator-prey equation, he and lizards should be natural friends given their common enemy is mosquitoes. But then, not everybody lip-smackingly relishes their enemies the way you-know-who does.
The world is complicated — the food, the consumer as well as the appetite.
More years have passed by and our boy is growing in to a man. His attitude towards lizards hasn’t changed a bit. He still gets freaked out by the mere sight of those slithering bastards. To his credit, he has maintained a fastidious distance with them for over two decades now. You don’t talk of who you don’t like. You don’t reckon those you don’t wish to be reckoned with. However, this arrangement has come at a price. He would keep his windows — be it in his bathroom or bedroom — closed and even the space beneath his door jammed to ensure none of the members of the reptile community ever stumble into his zone. So, although he wasn’t thinking much of them, they were subconsciously always inside his skull. His whole life allowed zero tolerance for a particular species.
Plot twist: You can’t control everything.
One morning, while getting ready for work, he opened his cabinet to pick his clothes. Before he could gather what happened, a gecko ran along the sleeve of his shirt before jumping onto the wall. Shock is a tiny word to describe what our boy-turned-man felt at that precise moment. His reflex made him react like he was bitten by a cactus if cacti could bite. Within the next few seconds, our man was sweating profusely. He could still feel the touch it left on the back of his right palm.
Cold. Creepy. Callous.
To his temporary relief, his villain climbed out of the window as if it had accomplished its mission and is on its way to the base camp. Somehow, he held himself up and pretended things were fine. During the next 20 minutes, he had left the apartment building and was on his way to office. He didn’t want to mull over what just occurred so he tried to distract himself by reading some articles on Medium. The cab driver was uncharacteristically quiet that day. It seemed like even he was aware of the touching incident upstairs.
Fear has no shape. You can’t reason with it. Science can box it in to categories and call it a phobia but that’s that. Only a boy who grew up fearing lizards knows how it is. To the rest of the world, it’s a condition called herpetophobia but to him, it’s about survival. To him, those silky smooth creatures are destined to slip down the wall but somehow don’t. Their almost-human-like skin, zen patience, inquisitive tongue sliding in and out of their tiny head, tinier feet; just too much to handle. He loses his bearings and you can’t really blame him. A human brain is a unique machine without anybody responsible for its wiring. You think the way you do. You feel the way you like. Others can’t really alter the course of your stimuli. The world acts. You react.
To our hero, the touch wouldn’t dissipate from his memory. He couldn’t remember how it felt when his mother ran her fingers through his hair or his first kiss or a firm handshake with his client. The only sensation his mind could muster was that of a gecko running across his hand for less than a fraction of a second. The very thought disgusted him but for reasons ironic, it remained etched. He couldn’t shake it off.
Over the next few days, he noticed that he would drop things half-attentively. A cup here. A pen there. An unusual development of a trait which clearly didn’t suit him. Everything suddenly appeared slippery. To make matters worse, he’d say things he didn’t intend to during important meetings.
Something was going on. Maybe he was losing grip on his sanity. Maybe his life was slipping out of his control. Either way, he blamed that freaking lizard.
