text: This is a very unorthodox "scary" story, but it's something that has been on my mind a lot lately. I don't know why. When I was a freshman in high school, I enrolled in a French class as a required language course. The teacher was not very popular. She was a middle-aged Persian woman named Madame Rahbar who had been teaching French and Farsi in the US for a few years. Madame Rahbar didn't have much of a sense of humor, but she was a good person and tried to get through to us. As young teenagers, we were pretty merciless. I think I was sixteen years old while I took her class. I can't say I was especially obnoxious to her, but I definitely didn't give her the respect she deserved, and occasionally sassed her. Some of the other kids were worse. On more than one occasion she cried. One day, Madame Rahbar came to class in a wheelchair. She didn't have any casts on, but explained that she had been in a car accident that had injured her hips. We were a bit nicer to her then, but not by much. About two weeks after that, she unceremoniously disappeared, never to return to my high school. She was replaced by a man named Mr. West, who was a charming old teacher who would sing French songs on the acoustic guitar. He enthralled us and earned our respect very quickly. After a few days, nobody remembered Madame Rahbar. It was as if she never existed. At one point I found myself standing at the urinal in the men's room, flanked by our school's football coach and Chinese teacher. They were talking about teachers who had left because of how awful the kids were. I finally recalled my old French teacher and asked, "Whatever happened to Madame Rahbar?" The Chinese teacher said to me, "Oh, she had cancer. She was pretty sick." I recall distinctly, even now, that this was probably the first time in my life I ever truly felt like a piece of shit. It was a very adult feeling, something kids don't normally experience. Everything about her made sense: the waning energy to deal with us, the increasing frailty of her appearance, her reluctance to discuss the accident. I felt responsible for being a burden to her at a time when she really could have used some cheering up. The saddest thing is, teenagers have incredible short memories. Even after that revelation, Madame Rahbar faded from my mind, lost in the din of gossip and schoolyard hierarchies and homework. It wasn't until several months later that I remembered she even existed. It was winter now. I had met a girl named Brittany, and we had agreed to go on a date in Laguna Beach (near my school). That night was particularly cold, and we ate at a nice restaurant that completely cleared out my wallet. When we walked out at the end of the meal, there was a woman in a wheelchair sitting at the edge of the sidewalk. She was draped in a red blanket, and clutched a bin full of roses. A sign sat next to the chair that read "$1 each." There are a lot of homeless people in Laguna, but I instantly recognized this woman, even from thirty feet away, as Madame Rahbar. There really aren't any words to describe the abject sorrow that I felt upon recognizing her. I approached her and tried to speak to her, but when she looked into my eyes, she hung her head and pretended that I didn't exist, as many people had no doubt done to her that night. She knew me, and was too embarrassed to even talk to me. I was equally embarrassed; I had blown every single dollar I owned on an expensive dinner to impress a girl. I couldn't help her even if I wanted to. The pain of seeing her - someone who devoted her life to trying to help little bastards like me - reduced to this state is ineffable. I have carried this shame for over a decade, intermittently reminded of it after struggling to block it out. Each time I see a homeless woman, each time I hear someone speaking French, etc. People sometimes ask me, as a fan of horror, "what scares you?" I've never given this answer before, but I've done a lot of thinking and I want to tell you what scares the shit out of me. The fact that a respectable, hardworking woman could be betrayed by every single person in her life and left on her deathbed, a frigid wheelchair on a winter night in a posh beach city, scares me. Seeing her completely withered away by her illness and her despair, when by all rights she should have been surrounded by grateful pupils and family members, scares me. It freaks me out that people we once knew become people we ignore and block out because they make us feel helpless. It isn't death that terrifies me, but how people will look upon me when I am dying, because I've seen how the world looked upon a much more accomplished woman and scarcely remembered her name. I've looked her up and talked to my old principal. Nobody ever heard from Madame Rahbar again. I do not know if she survived. I doubt she did. The fact that I will never know for sure, and the fact that *nothing* I could do could take away that level of suffering, haunts me to this day. I'm 28 now and I still cry over this shit. I wish I could go back and hug her and thank her for trying her best for me, and apologize for not trying my best for her. But that horror has been productive for me. It has taught me to value people now, because I might not be able to do it later. And it's taught me to treat people with a kind of compassion I didn't have before; I try to imagine what that wretched loneliness must feel like, and what kind of man it makes me to inflict it upon them in some small way. But I will never get that image of her with those roses out of my head, as long as I live. And maybe it's good that I can't.