Fear and Freedom

I used to think the moments and actions that held my deepest fears were physical. They were clusters of tiny holes and spaces so small that I could feel the heat of my breath reflected onto my skin. They were touches on uncovered feet as I slept and that brief period of my life where I was almost positive I could see and hear dead people.

I realize today that it is not these physical fears that cripple me in everyday moments of my life. It is indeed easy to avert the eyes from clusters of tiny holes, even the ones on my showerhead. And with a clump of smoking sage in my hand, I proclaimed to the spirit world that I no longer wished to encounter figures standing in poorly lit corners of my house. So far, I think it's worked.

I realize the fears more real to me than the ones I can see and touch are the ones that make my fingertips feel hallow when I think about them. I would rather sit down with that woman I awoke to crying over me one night when I was 15-years-old than look these fears in their equally sad faces.

These fears are ones that empty my fingertips of their bones. They appear when I add the number of years I can realistically expect to have my parents on this earth to my age. They appear when I imagine what alone will feel like.

And more crippling than my fear of alone is the fear I have recently identified as the one of freedom.

Freedom terrifies me. It sucks the breath from the lowest cavern of my lungs and makes me wonder who is more alive, me or that shadow of a person in the corner of the room.

Like the fear of alone, freedom is a looming one. I always keep it just out of reach so I can imagine what it will feel like when I have it, except I never move my body close enough to grab it because when I take it is when the fear will happen.

I will not know what to do when freedom fills my hand and worry that I will toss it back to where it came from like a wet fish and then, I will never see it again. Freedom will swim back down to where it came from where it will lay camouflaged forever in a cluster of tiny holes.