Straight to Zebras

So I'm one of those "adults" who really, strongly dislikes being alone at night. Leave me alone during the day, fine—great, even! I love you!—night? No. My imagination is too good. The dark is too dark. And what if something like this were to happen again, when I was home alone with the kids? It wouldn't be good for my wussy nerves.

But sometimes, inevitably, I do find myself alone at night. It happened again recently, when Barclay went away for a few days for work. Obviously, the kids were here with me, but they're smaller than me, and likely smaller than any intruder is going to be, and they do very little to put my mind at ease, no offense to them. 

So I was suffering, is what I'm saying, I was laying in bed at midnight, and the dark was encroaching, as it does, and my imagination was going, and I was watching Gilmore Girls, trying to distract myself from being alone. It worked. I drifted off to sleep...

...and woke up only a few hours later to this...sound.

This unrecognizable, unfathomable, unreasonable sound. 

I had no idea what it was. I felt sure, as much as anyone can feel sure about anything at three in the morning, that I had never heard this sound before in my whole life. It was completely new. It was not the sound of someone breaking in, or of one of the kids falling out of bed—it was too loud, and too weird. It was not a real sound, I decided, not something from this realm, if you know what I mean. 

(I don't even know what I mean.) 

I will try to describe it for you:

It was a crash, so loud I could feel it in my chest. But it was...strangely musical? But not nice music: it was dissonant and ugly. And it just kept going. It was a sound that echoed and reverberated. It was hollow and frightening and otherworldly. I thought, I am dying! This is what dying sounds like! 

Because it didn't sound like anything else. 

Then it was just over, and I was sitting straight up in my bed, having sat all the way up before I even woke all the way up, and I began to second guess myself. Had I heard anything at all? Was it a dream? Could you dream a sound like that?

I sat there and listened for probably ten minutes. Nothing. Nothing at all. Not even a peep from the kids' rooms—and that made me doubt myself even more. Surely, if this noise was even half of what I thought it was, they'd be up and screaming bloody murder. 

But my heart was pounding, and my brain was fizzing, and I knew I could not fall back asleep without at least walking through the house and making sure everything was okay. I was not relishing the thought of walking through the dark rooms, hoping something wouldn't jump out at me, hoping I wouldn't hear that awful sound again. 

I went and looked at the kids first—fast asleep, both of them. Nothing amiss in either room. 

Okay.

I looked in the bathroom, in the shower. 

Nothing. 

I tip-toed into the kitchen, where everything was fine, and then down into the basement—nope; I stopped halfway down the stairs. Too scary. If there was something down there, it would have to meet me upstairs because I was not confronting it in what is objectively the scariest place in the house.

The last room left unexplored was the living room. It was quiet, and mostly normal, except for one thing: my acoustic guitar was lying on the floor in the middle of the room. 

I stared at it. This was weird. I was still much too tired to work it out. How had it gotten here? 

I know, I know. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Look around, use logic. I know. But I went straight to zebras; I always go straight to zebras. I thought, THERE IS A GHOST IN HERE AND IT THREW MY GUITAR ON THE FLOOR.

Like, I only thought that for a few terrifying seconds, but I did think it. 

But okay. Here's what actually happened:

My guitar hangs on a holder above the piano. 

Need I say more? 

Probably not, but I'll say more anyway: the anchor for the guitar holder came right out of the wall. 

At three in the morning, on one of the five nights of the whole year that Barclay was not home with me. 

Unlucky timing at its very finest. 

It came out of the wall, and fell, along with the guitar, directly onto the piano keys. The guitar then bounced off of the piano and onto the piano bench. It bounced off of the piano bench and onto the floor, and then it bounced across the floor, where it skittered to a stop in the middle of the living room, amidst the din of piano hammers striking piano strings and guitar strings striking the floor, echoing through both instruments and through the floorboards and through the thin wall into my bedroom on the other side, where I had been sleeping the fitful sleep of someone who just KNEW that Something was going to happen, purely because Barclay had gone away for work. 

My question is: how am I supposed to grow into a well-adjusted adult who can be left alone at night if things like this keep going on?