Holiday Fear Number 254

I am sitting on the train. Outside, holiday lights blink and blur, and my slumbering childhood stirs in a moment of remembered delight. But the echoes are tempered by urban teenagers who sit across the aisle, their saucy language peppered with explosive laughter. They are intimidating and I am a thread, straining to connect two folds in the world, the dangerous and the magical. It’s a world I wish to share with my young daughter, to introduce her to the enchantment of my youth. Yet I fear this world, where teenagers lurk like demons behind stalagmites, watching and waiting to poison the innocent with the ills of the chaos from which they've sprung.