Just the other night...

I lost two years of my life due to a fright. How did this happen you ask? I'll tell you.
I was walking down the stairs grumbling silently to myself about how annoying it is to have to get up at 10:30p.m. to get a drink of water. As I passed the living room and entered the kitchen, I heard a very quiet, "Hi Amy." My still adjusting eyes then reported the sighting of a skinny person, just tall enough to be a very short adult standing other the other side of the island from me. It was obviously a guy's body, there was just enough light for me to be able to tell he had his shirt off. In seeing him and not recognizing him, I then jumped aproximately two feet in the air (and a few inches to the right), only to realize it was only my brother. It seems that poor Collin had suffered the same inconvenience that I had in the thirst department and had silently slipped down the stairs just a few minutes before me. His acknowlegement of my approach was simply his way of letting me know he was there for the purpose of not scaring me. Unfortunately he failed to realize that seeing a dark figure in the downstairs level of the house so late at night can easily result in a scare. Plus the fact that I am actually slightly afraid of the dark. I generally do a pretty good job of keeping my fear under wraps, I almost never scream and even during this incident, not one sound came out of my mouth other than the sound of my breath getting rapidly sucked into my lungs.
After Collin had appologized to me three times for his unintentional yet wicked prank, we started joking around about what, had he wanted to scare me, he should have done to get the maximum shock-value-reaction out of me. One suggestion he made was to have simply put his arm around my shoulders and start a random conversation. His whole idea was that my reaction would have been to faint; but I actually doubt that would have happened. As far as I know, fainting doesn't seem to be a family trait of ours. I don't think it happens nearly as much as it does on TV. I think my reaction would have been more on the order of dropping the empty glass I had already been holding. Either way, it was a really funny thing to go through especially considering the only way to truly scare me is in the dark.