Week 5 Topic
If fear is the heart of love, then I should be drowning in it, shouldn’t I? Yet, all my life, I’ve been afraid -- of everything. There *is* a kind of fear in bubblegum love with sweaty palms and a quickening heartbeat; but not a debilitating and paralyzing kind of fear, a fear that makes you afraid to live. If thought about too hard or too long, I feel that darkness creep up my spine like snakes slithering in shadows. It’s like the idea of picking up a cup. You have hands, so wrap your fingers around the cup and pick it up! Everyone else can, so why can’t you? Just pick it up! … but I can’t.
What keeps me up at night used to be the bad dreams, the terrible dreams that were more than just dreams but unwanted spiritual “visits.” … Now … I’m not too sure … The fear is there, to remind me of the chains that it has around me, and how tight it would make them if I should ever make those positive thoughts a reality. A master to a slave … I have been such a slave to fear and of other people’s opinions, wants, and desires. Only in the depths of my mind and in my words have I ever felt like an individual. And even that was taken away for a time …
But only for a time.
It is the beginning and starting that makes me afraid. Afraid to speak. Afraid to mess up a pristine piece of paper with my scribbles and scrawls: a reflection of what I truly think about myself. But getting over that trepidation, I begin to enjoy the process of creating, of putting lines on paper, forming thoughts and ideas -- doing what I do best. And for the briefest moment, I remember …
It was a love that could never hope to be touched by another; it was always so much higher than that. And it was that unobtainable idea that others have sought to destroy in me. But an inferno only needs the tiniest flicker of flame and the smallest breath of a prayer to scorch the ground.
In my despair, I’ve forgotten what it felt like: to love something intangible. It showed, how often it showed in the only way I knew how. It was everything to me where every other relationship and aspect of life failed, and perhaps that was the trap. I never had to be taught, the skill was always there. As the years went by, I went more and more into myself and I silently shut and locked the door. I lived and yet I didn't live. Vicariously was all that was needed, breathed the lie. And so I wrote, blood upon the pages of a pathetic and wasted life.
Years have gone by, and like a past love, I tap on that door in hopes that it will open. Things cannot be the same, of course, and they shouldn’t be. My scratches on the page have gotten better, though perhaps that is why my words feel shoved aside out of hurt and neglect in favor of a drawing. The two go beautifully hand-in-hand, I remind cheerfully. Perhaps a new and better start can be made, if you’ll only let me? Remind me of the words I used to love; teach me how to use them again and oh, the stories that will be told.
A lock clicks and the door creaks open.
What keeps me up at night used to be the bad dreams, the terrible dreams that were more than just dreams but unwanted spiritual “visits.” … Now … I’m not too sure … The fear is there, to remind me of the chains that it has around me, and how tight it would make them if I should ever make those positive thoughts a reality. A master to a slave … I have been such a slave to fear and of other people’s opinions, wants, and desires. Only in the depths of my mind and in my words have I ever felt like an individual. And even that was taken away for a time …
But only for a time.
It is the beginning and starting that makes me afraid. Afraid to speak. Afraid to mess up a pristine piece of paper with my scribbles and scrawls: a reflection of what I truly think about myself. But getting over that trepidation, I begin to enjoy the process of creating, of putting lines on paper, forming thoughts and ideas -- doing what I do best. And for the briefest moment, I remember …
It was a love that could never hope to be touched by another; it was always so much higher than that. And it was that unobtainable idea that others have sought to destroy in me. But an inferno only needs the tiniest flicker of flame and the smallest breath of a prayer to scorch the ground.
In my despair, I’ve forgotten what it felt like: to love something intangible. It showed, how often it showed in the only way I knew how. It was everything to me where every other relationship and aspect of life failed, and perhaps that was the trap. I never had to be taught, the skill was always there. As the years went by, I went more and more into myself and I silently shut and locked the door. I lived and yet I didn't live. Vicariously was all that was needed, breathed the lie. And so I wrote, blood upon the pages of a pathetic and wasted life.
Years have gone by, and like a past love, I tap on that door in hopes that it will open. Things cannot be the same, of course, and they shouldn’t be. My scratches on the page have gotten better, though perhaps that is why my words feel shoved aside out of hurt and neglect in favor of a drawing. The two go beautifully hand-in-hand, I remind cheerfully. Perhaps a new and better start can be made, if you’ll only let me? Remind me of the words I used to love; teach me how to use them again and oh, the stories that will be told.
A lock clicks and the door creaks open.