My Childhood Trauma (Junior Writing)

You wake up by the warm morning sunshine shining your bedroom curtain. You get ready to go to Kindergarten as usual, preparing some lollipops and snacks for your friends. As the fickle weather of early spring chills the ground, you get out your thick jacket from the top of the wardrobe, barely by stepping on the tall chair. You call your daddy who drives you to the Kindergarten everyday.

The kindergarten is in the 2^nd floor of a gray colored building.

2^nd floor.

NO it isn’t.

It feels as if there were 10 floors between the lobby of the building and the entrance of your cozy kindergarten. The overwhelming numbers of stairs that connected the first floor with the second one is like a pit of frightful hell you must pass in order to reach a heaven.

After dozing off for couple ten minutes, you arrive at the building. You are quite scarred, thinking how awful it is to climb up each stair that made you so nervous.

“Daddy…” you said in a shrinking voice

“Again? What makes you feel so uneasy that you cannot go up by yourself?” Dad replied

“uhmm…just…it’s so scary….” You answered

Holding your dad’s hand firmly, you take a deep breath, and start going up the stairs one by one. The scariest thing was that the stairs were right aside by a huge glass window; as you glance at the outside view, your heart beats faster and your hand becomes more filled with sweat.

‘I might just fall! I can’t take my step’ you shuddered with fear

After passing such obstacle you see your friends playing and chatting happily in the snug little room. You can then finally say goodbye to your daddy who might-or has to-come to the second floor again to escort you down.

Back then, you were a small 7-year-old boy who feared climbing up stairs by yourself, especially those in your kindergarten building. Every moment of going up made you feel insecure, as every electron gets unstable when they go to the upper electron shell. Maybe you were just a boy who had a light acrophobia, considering how you got especially terrified when you looked the outside view through the window glass during your ‘climbing’. Anyway, when you were young kindergarten kid you always needed someone-your daddy, brother or even a stranger-to safely usher you to the heavenly playground. It was also the same when returning back to home, now having to descend the stairs.

Going down the stairs was even more fearful than going up. The interval of each stair seemed so huge to merely a 1-meter-tall boy. Sometimes you succeeded in climbing up by yourself, but never did so when descending. Your legs literally quivered out of such apprehension about tumbling down or twisting your ankles. When the needle of the clock hanged on the pastel colored wall of a cozy kindergarten room headed number ‘3’, you suddenly became anxious, imagining how terrible your return-to-home would be today.

How poignant this trauma is? Well…you, now grown up as a 17-year-old teenager, can even remember exactly how the outside view through that window glass looked like. Though it might look quite silly to others, going up and down the stairs are definitely unforgettable in your life. In fact, whenever you go through stairs with banisters, you do remember this threatening childhood experience. Don’t you?