Whispered warnings emerge from the void, feverish in their machinations of a future not yet manifested. They come from a voice more frightened than mine has ever been, inspired by years spent within this fallible mortal coil. To be a being of everglow confined to flesh that can bruise, bones that can break, and veins that can bleed is beautiful, violent terror.
Most of my life has been drowned in a cacophonous orchestra of fear. Many times, I’ve tripped on trepidation, intent on protecting this incarnation from the catalogue of ways it can be hurt. It is a delicate amalgamation of atoms, woven together, frozen into form, too fragile for a world so cruel.
Fear is one part cage and one part armor. It is chains and chainmail, shackles and swords crossed defensively over the heart. It takes life in service of my human self, a doting parental force with a goal so singular, it excludes all senses beyond the essential. It sees existence as a narrow hallway, sudden death assured on every detour. It yearns only to protect. In a realm of tears on the skin and tears in the eyes, fear finds grand purpose.
Preserve the vessel until expiration. Prevent expiration until forces beyond comprehension become stronger than control.
Solid matter in motion wishes to stay in motion. Self-safeguarding is a logical, sensible thing, because it is a creation of the logical, sensible plane. Yet, I am not a logical, sensible thing, and I did not originate in a logical, sensible place.
There is a me that yearns to think without thought and act without heed. It is more ancient than the marrow that builds my shipwreck spine and the red droplets that surge in my sea of blood. It is the unknowable endless, forever thirsting for the thrills and trills of corporeal experience. It seeks ecstasy through exhilaration, euphoria in moments of happiness and of horror. It is freedom attempting to flow within a framework, chaos masquerading as order. Sweet impermanence, so treacly, so temporal, and so possessed by something drunk on ephemeral intoxication.
I am starlight inextinguishable, dimmed for the satisfaction of a life lived between beats and breaths. The timely pulses of my heart and spasms of my lungs are a necessary bare minimum. All that is wonderful is found between them, beyond what is mere and momentary, down the detours.
When fear cries out, freedom silences it. The great hallway of safety, all creaking floorboards and closed doors, crumbles at the might of a soulquake. The walls wither, consumed by termites of valor and dangerous dreams. Vibrations of divine disorder dismantle its foundation until only splinters remain.
Then, when all is cleared, all is revealed.
This isn’t a place of unrelenting, inescapable torment and pain made inevitable. It isn’t sands of suffering with only mirages of peace speckled throughout. It only seems that way, at first, as it should. To new eyes, the sun always burns. Only when they adjust can they see the light, and in this world, there is so much light.
Fear promised a desert of desolate death, but in reality, it is a cool ocean spiraling with cerulean hues. All that is worthwhile lies here, at the peak of each wave, the drop of each sand shelf, and within the darkest of depths. I seek to embrace the thermocline, let my skin grow frigid as I discover why caution bores and danger delights.
I seek to find myself in fearlessness, for it has made me unrecognizable for far too long.
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