Fear of Us
by Anon
TW: mention of blades
As I stroke the broken binding of my book, I contemplate. Too many things. What should I write? “You’re okay, it’s okay.” Words that I always seek-sought and that others had enough of. “Declare your space, you’ve waited long enough for it to be gifted.” Something more that I’ve sought, but something also that others find scarce. If not invisible.
Where does it all come from? The emotion. The fear. The love. The fear of love. The love of fear.
Where do I come from?
Not just fear or love. Only sometimes I fear-love that I might be. It makes things simple. Simplicity because things have never been simple. A simple fear-love of complexity, that is simple in itself. There is nothing hidden behind me. Nothing hidden in front. I am simple, but I pretend that I am complex. Or is it the other way around?
I am so afraid. Or am I brave? Are they distinct things? Do you have to be afraid to be brave? To keep on keeping on, to trod and have trode.
I am so afraid. I am so in love. I am so afraid of losing my love that I am afraid of loving. I want to hug my scars, my people who are like my scars in the way that they have been hurt and they have healed over it. I am afraid for their lives, for their scars which are like people in the way they have been scared and have lived beyond it. I am afraid for the lucid surreality of the ways in which a person’s scars can seem healed, as if they were never hurt. I am afraid for us, who have scars that even we ourselves can’t see. For everyone else who has similar scars, in different ways, but if we put them together they look almost the same. I am afraid of the knife that cuts us. And the way it cuts. My friends who cannot see the blade as it comes, and it comes, and it comes, and it came. And we are left on our own to pretend, to fathom, to comprehend ourselves. To pretend to have seen the blade coming.
And I am in love for the blade that cuts the flesh away. That adds the flesh upon. I am in love, for that rare glance of the scalpel where for once my friends are cut in a way that they permit, and where they are in love. Where they see the blade coming, and where it is gone, but its effects are as if nothing ever changed. The scars that heal not as illusions but as smiling flesh that touches them as they touch it.