The Face of Fear

Her mouth is wide open, and, her eyes are teary and wild. She looks frantically around, while sitting on the seat of a BMX bike, rolling as she pushes with her legs towards the curb. Several others watch from the arched entryway of a derelict brick building, in the shade of an unhealthy tree. I notice the man to the left of the biker.
He's holding a syringe in his left hand, and it's pointing straight up, entering his arm on the inside of his elbow. The syringe and its placement are burnt into my mind like a childhood nightmare--the irrational fear that something extremely bad is about to happen, and that I'd better damn well wake up, because what's coming next is beyond comprehension, and too horrifying to even consider experiencing.
"That's Vancouver," Nathan says. More accurately, this is Vancouver's East Hastings. Someone later tells me it's an area called Tinseltown, but by my eyes, it's everything but. I'd never seen anything like this before. Perhaps that means I'm sheltered, or naive or what have you. Regardless, irrational fear was my only response. While Nathan pushed his sleeping son through this group of people, and despite his reassurances, I walked well into the centre of the otherwise quiet street, and gave these people as much room as I thought I should have. Me.
They were monsters. Not through any fault of their own, or in any way they could help, but only in that, in what vestiges of the mind of a six-year-old I still carry with me, they were the embodiment of terror and confusion. I wanted distance. They could cause harm. Nothing else was important.
Looking back afterwards, I wondered briefly, what happens to people like that. What happened, too. The face of that strange, 20-something BMX woman is etched into my mind. And the needle. That and awkward, childless, ignorant fear. I don't want to see that again. Or feel it. I somehow don't know what to do with the fear. But now I know where nightmares come from. And more than anything, I want them to go away.