Avoidance

It’s late, time to face the terror of sleep.  Try not to grind my teeth and clench every muscle, waking unrested and sickly yet again.  And yet I never really do face it, do I?  That yawning pit is always lurking there, in the background.  The dark corner too terrible to look at.  I hope to pass, each night, from wakefulness into oblivion so swiftly I do not see it as I go by.  As though wishing for a swift death to the day. 

In the morning I wake, late already, with it howling at me, berating me for my ineffectiveness, for my cowardice.  And each day I put off looking at it till tomorrow.  As though I don’t know what’s there.  I know.  Everybody knows.  The roaringly obvious lack of purpose.  The blisteringly apparent ineffectuality, the laughably empty shell of identity, as though it were a thin and brittle replica, a mask fashioned after a real person with a soul.  The fear, the fundamental fear, that I will go nowhere, achieve nothing, fail to even show up in the morning, that I will always miss all the fun.  The fear of falling into formlessness, unable to operate my own mind and body, unable to work out how it’s done or what went wrong.  The fear that if I ever had a purpose in this life, it has long been lost and will not be found, and it’s my fault.  Of course I know what’s there. 

And why am I so afraid of such notions?  Because they’re true.  There’s a good half-bucket of truth in every damn one of them.  I can’t bear to look at those fears because I can’t bear to see that any of them hold water.  There, I’ve said it. 

I know how to deal with fears.  And I mean deep, subconscious, visceral, brought-it-from-another-life fears.  I’ve done it before.  You have to accept that your very worst fears could all be utterly, mercilessly true.  And then you have to find a way to survive. 

But me, hero of my own daydreams, I keep telling myself that I’ll do it tomorrow, because today is laundry day, and I need to call the phone company and read the paper. 

It’s not a fear though, is it?  Not at its heart.  No, a fear – a phobia – is something that may never happen, but you can’t face anyway.  This is not an unfounded fear, but a denial.  A denial of something that is very real and is – bleedingly obviously – happening. 

And you see now, it’s just gone 12:01.  I’ve passed the mild peak of drowsiness and am beginning to wake again.  I’ve just indulged my own cowardice another time, and wrecked another day, before it’s even begun.  I watch myself in bleak amazement.