(Un)Afraid

I write for the fear of time. I write with the hope that I am more than just a granule of sand sliding towards oblivion through the narrow neck of an hourglass, more than just an etching on a tombstone that will evanesce before my bones do, more than just a skeleton with a heartbeat — the ticking of a clock, counting down to midnight. I write to extend each and every single one of my breaths, to savor each one before my last. I write in an attempt to wrestle with the fleeting nature of time. 

One minute, I am five and my father holds my hand as he picks me up from school, telling me to never let go. “Bad luck,” he says. The next minute, I am six and the sound of his voice cuts like breaking glass. The next minute, I am eight and a cheap birthday card is all I have left of him. The next minute, I am seventeen and I would not recognize him — my very own father — if he walked past me on the street. 

I write for the fear of forgetfulness. I want to remember my best friend’s ultraviolet laugh ringing through the car when we drove under streetlights and stars. How it felt tangerine when we sang off-key with Gerard Way and the lyrics drifted through the air as we walked back to her house: I am not afraid to keep on living. I am not afraid to walk this world alone. I want to remember how it felt aquamarine when my first crush smiled at me, when our friends told us to “just date already.” I want to remember that my childhood home glowed golden like sunflowers. How my world felt cotton candy pink with my ivory bed sheets covered in lilac dragonflies. How the summer days spent swimming through glittering water and running barefoot through the grass felt cobalt. I want to remember that I am blood red at seventeen.

I write for the fear of illiteracy. I always carry a pen and a pad of paper; afraid that if I go a day without writing, my hands will refuse to ever move over a page again. My friends remind me that this will never occur. To them, writing seems like riding-a-bike-after-a-few-years kind of easy — merely muscle and procedural memory. After a couple of wobbles, you’ll cruise on by. To me, going back to writing seems more like trying to get back on a bike with a flat tire, that goes off a ramp, through a flaming hoop, and over sixty cars in an attempt to land on a safety mat; I won’t even make it up the ramp. Or worst of all, going back to writing seems like trying to get back on a bike with training wheels on a straight, flat sidewalk — a five-year-old can do it, so should I.  Yet, I will still somehow fall off and scrape my knees. 

I write for the fear of loneliness. I can mold whole humans from the dust of my words, breathe life into them with syntax and grammar. They carry on through my persistence only, breathing because I breathe for them, and thinking because I think for them. I try to make them perfect: they are happy with their situation, they have no insecurities about how they look, and no debilitating health issues. They are everything I am not. That is what it’s like to have a merciful god. 

I write for the fear of dishonesty. I cannot lie on paper. If I do, my falsehoods will haunt me behind closed eyelids and I will sleep walk onto the page and squash my duplicity. I once wrote a faux personal essay. I didn’t sleep the night before the due date, instead spending the time rewriting it with candor. The words I speak, however, fade fast. Riddled with half-lies, they sing out with faked candor. Riddled with half-truths, if put on the page, my words ring out like a death knell.  My tongue is compulsive and shifty like a snake, and my pen will rip off each of its scales given the chance. Vice versa, the words on paper will never lie to me – unlike my mother who sat outside the doctor’s office in our car, sobbing as she asked for my forgiveness for her dishonesty. The EKG results printed in medical jargon onto bleached tree pulp didn’t lie, but my mother did when she kept that paper from me. 

What does it take for a grown woman to cry? A death sentence for her daughter. 

I write for the fear of the unknown. My words must bind. I want to classify the things I do not know. (What makes my chest constrict in pain, what causes my pulmonary veins to rewire themselves into the wrong atrium ? Family: congenital defects, genus: heart, species: PAPVR, subspecies: <1% of all congenital heart defects.) Even if my categorization does not fit, it makes me feel safer. Safer because of the semblance of control. I cherish the pretense, cherish it because a broken chain can be fixed, cherish it because a misnomer is better than no name at all, and cherish it because things exist only if they have a name tag — without a diagnosis, no one believed me when I said that it felt like a jagged knife had plunged straight through my chest. 

I write for the fear of dying. The moment after you die, your heart stops beating and the tissues so dependent on the nutrients from your blood begin to starve. Four minutes after you die, your body decays as enzymes trigger cells to commit apoptosis. Twenty-four hours after you die, your internal organs begin to decompose as your membranes rupture and enzymes begin to consume you piece by piece. Eight days after you die, your blood begins to decompose — an open invitation for maggots to make a home in your corpse. As the body breaks down all its soft tissue, the insects continue to feast. A month after you die, your body liquifies, leaving only a pile of bones. Words don’t end up a slushie. 

A year after you die, you cross everyone's mind once in awhile. Ten years after you die, they only remember you when looking through high school yearbooks. Fifty years after you die, your loved ones are the only ones who still keep you in their hearts. One hundred years after you die, no one will be left to remember your name. Words, again, do not end up this way. 

I write for the fear of how I will die. The doctors say that it will happen ten years from now, perhaps even sooner if I don’t have surgery, when my heart simply can no longer maintain the excess amount of blood flowing through it and bursts. I am afraid that I will die with this heart full of blood. I am afraid that I will die with this heart full of words. I am afraid that I will die with this heart full of fears. 

 I write for the fear of fear itself. 

If I lay my fears all out on the page, reducing them to pigment; they no longer taunt me with each heartbeat, they no longer slam against my cardiac muscle in a bid to escape, they no longer make my heart want to explode, they no longer make me want to die. 

I write because I am unafraid. I have to be so that I might live.