Published in On Our Selection News December  5, 2013

Having an overactive imagination is harmful.

Last night, I spent the night in the house by myself. Spending the night alone in my uni accommodation townhouse in Brisbane is totally fine, but for some reason the old family house is a potentially life threatening situation. As far as I know, there are no Indian graves under the house, nor were there patients who died during from that (fictional) time our house was converted into a makeshift war hospital.

I blame the family portraits. Not only were they horrific to sit for, but as someone is getting violently hacked to death in a crime show, the camera inevitably pans to the family portraits that get sporadically splattered with blood before it cuts to the opening credits. That and all serial killers that feature on these shows tend to have a family complex that makes them murder nice families.

I shouldn’t be freaked out. I turned on Sex and the City in the hope that I would feel like a sassy, independent woman who isn’t afraid of anything, but instead all I felt was annoyed at how many times the main character says a variant of “I wondered…” and made everyone assume that anyone with a pair of ovaries has a crippling obsession with shoes.

Before that, I put up the Christmas tree and decorated the house. It looks like Santa had too many rum balls and vomited up all things Christmas in my lounge room. It’s so wholesome that there are even the fifteen year old crappy decorations we made as kids that my hoarder family can’t bring themselves to throw away. But then I turned out the light to go to bed, it looked somehow slightly sinister. This is the exact sequence that would make for a great crime show “Christmas special”.

The whole scenario just seemed like the start of an episode of Criminal Minds to me. There are shaky shots of me hanging decorations in the window where the camera is in amongst some bushes and there’s someone wheezing in the background to get that “scary stalker breath” effect. Then a struggle ensues and it results in me wrapped up in tinsel with a neatly slit throat. He’ll take a lock of my hair because that indicates some kind of psych- related business and will require the brilliant mind of Dr Read.

The truth is that I’m not writing this at the safety of my work desk with three other colleagues who could be killed first, acting as decoys, allowing me to get away to safety. I’m writing from the vulnerable position of my bedroom. That bit at the start about “last night” was a lie.

I made the scenario of me collapsing dead by the Christmas tree due to a neat slit of the throat to save myself the agony of a long and painful death that you often see on Criminal Minds. I don’t know how this night will end. Sure, I have the light above the stove on to frighten the serial killers and I’ll pull the doona up over my head, but as foolproof of a security system as I may have in place, I worry that it may not be enough.

I knew that I should have watched Home Alone instead of The Grinch. At least then I would have felt like turning my home into a comical deathtrap and getting a bowl cut instead of fearing that Jim Carrey was going to break in to my house.