The most Outrageous Phobia

Everyone has at least one thing that they have a fear of which usually includes something normal and generic like bees, snakes, or worms. The conventional reasoning for people to be afraid of something may be because it could hurt them or they had an awful experience with it. My phobia is not one that an average person would generally have. I am deathly afraid of butterflies.

Yes, I realize that there is no possible way that a single butterfly could harm me, but knowing that does not lessen my fear of those monstrous beasts. I also realize that they are a bigger and prettier version of a butterfly. One may wonder how someone could be so afraid of, those cute little flying insects. My encounters with butterflies are like an encounter with a ferocious man-eating bear. There is a reasonable explanation for my phobia of those flying menaces and it all started about eleven years ago. I was five at the time and my parents and I were at the St. Louis Zoo my parents made the suggestion to go to the Butterfly House and I was excited about it. Don't get me wrong I love the zoo and I still go there, but I haven't gone into the Butterfly House since then. Little did I know that when I walked out of the big, glass building, I was going to be changed forever. When I first peered at the tiny insects I noticed how beautiful they looked. The bright pastel colors of blue, green, yellow, and red seemed to attract my eyes and draw me closer to them. Most butterflies have beautiful geometrical and organic shaped designs all along their wings and yet those were what scared me the most. While in the middle of my admiration of the beautiful creatures one decided to land on me and then not long after that more started to come closer to me. The thought of their gigantic elaborately designed wings brushing against me makes me cringe, in fact I am cringing right now just writing about it. Usually when I tell anyone about my fear of butterflies I can see a faint smile start to appear, at that point I can tell that they are trying their best not to laugh, or the individual may just laugh and then I usually laugh with them. I swear those butterflies were the size of my face.

Last summer we went camping, which is what we do every summer, and I knew that there would be butterflies there, but there was no way for me to prepare for what was going to happen. It was our second night there and I was just minding my own business when I opened the camper door and something decided to come in with me. A minute after I was in there I turned around and saw something fluttering on the ceiling. It was a large, grey and menacing moth that was a little bigger than the size of a half dollar coin. I can still hear the fluttering sound that the wings made when they bumped up against the off white bumpy wall. I flew across the camper to the nearest bed, took the red and white striped sheets, yanked it over my head, and tucked myself under the sheets. A few minutes later I could hear the door open and then my family started dying laughing. My mother said, What are you doing under the sheets? I responded with, There is a moth in here! After my response my dad questioned, Why did you let it in? then I replied with, It's not like I asked the moth if it wanted to come inside!

There are also many practical jokes that my wonderful family enjoys to pull on me. I remember one time, about a year ago, my mom decided to do a small prank on me. She is a bus driver for the special school district so she always has decorations hanging in the bus and one of them just happened to be ten butterflies with suction cups on them. When I walked into my house after school I put my white backpack with red hearts hearts down on the white bench at the front door. Then walked into the family room and the first thing that I noticed was the large grey framed mirror which usually was empty, but on that day it definitely was not. The mirror was covered with a kaleidoscope of colorful monarch butterflies. It seemed like they were peering right into my soul almost like a teacher looking at a student who didn't do their homework for the millionth time. I looked over at my mom who was sitting in the brown rocking chair and her face was as red as the wattle on a rooster, because she was laughing so hard. Her laugh was as loud as a rooster crowing and sounded like a hyena. Even though I make light of my phobia, I really am terrified of butterflies. There are thousands of other stories that involve phobias but I am sure that mine are the silliest of them all.

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