I have spent most of my life rolling around on the surface of things as a tightly woven ball of anxieties and fear, allowing myself to be tossed from one mistake to another by the powers that be, which hold dominion over this macabre practical joke of a universe for whatever reason, if any. I believe there is a reason, simply because of the mathematical improbability of shapeless matter happening to topple into the exact existential matrix of a concert pianist, if for no other reason, but I am, after all, just a flawed human who could be wrong.
The universe hovers in every direction like a thunderstorm or a song, depending on which voice you are listening to. Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, but it’s still there. I was blind for so long.
I had resolved to be done with all foolishness, too, then, what now seems like many years ago, but the resolution was tainted, me being yet saturated with the old things. He that fears has not been made perfect in love, and the fear in me then was yet full and thick. There wasn’t much in me that wasn’t wholly rooted and grounded in it, and being as how it really was such a perfect storm, one might consider it almost a matter of course that things would have played out in such a way.
Ripped open and laid bare, we fled only after having been raped through and through, clinging to one another like two drowning children, spiraling slowly downward at different speeds and in different directions, with not the slightest bit of real understanding of just exactly how bad it really was. Neither one of us knew yet, the things we’d then slowly come to realize, me through the drunken haze of a rage that came barreling forth to annihlate everything that meant anything, and her clawing at the last shreds of her faith and sanity, desperately looking for something solid to hold onto through the storm, and finding no such thing.
Here I am now, alone but alive and realizing again what awful folly it is to build up treasure of any kind on this earth, but also with the understanding now of that fear. That awful, terrible, toxic cancer which destroyed everything before. We’d lost it all in the fire, and that fear had been the spark.
Never again. Henceforth fear no more.
Thou shalt.
