# Fear (essay)



## Raziel (May 3, 2005)

This is an essay that I sent to a contest and got second place with. It basically started off as a creative assignment to write about a re-occuring theme in our everyday lives. My teacher liked it and asked me to submit it to the contest. 

	I fear that a shift has been made. A complacency far too often felt by tranquil monsters has now found a new domain. My mind, although plagued by an affinity with desire, can no longer sustain equilibrium with this intruder. Fear has gotten a hold of me, or so it has had one for a while. It wasn’t until the sun swayed in the sky in my dream that I realized this. I saw it (the sun), covered in a tan haze of sawdust, in battle with itself. The sky, in the most polite of ways, ignored the orange giant’s torment, bleeding blue above the eucalyptuses with a manner that most would deem ignorant. I, myself, was standing in a field fearing the end of the world. I knew that it would not hurt, that the flash of the sun’s explosion would quickly erase my life, but I still trembled. The entire cosmos seemed to be frozen still, everything gazing upon the frantic randomness of the sun’s movement in the sky, which quickly became a frenetic fury of colossal glitches. And as the sky finally gave in to temptation and bled the most pure vermilion, the sun released itself from the eons of pain. I wake, of course, but the dream leaves me shaken and scared. Fear, the most powerful of emotions (most powerful to those who do not believe in its might) has compelled me.
	Failure, the source of the most powerful of fears, has bore its face to me every day. For every action I make, there lies a chance of me failing to carry out that action. In effect, I am left performing activities in constant fervor, questioning my ability to complete them successfully. Not only do my actions bear the possibility of failure, but on most occasions the possibility of failure outweighs the possibility of success.  To ameliorate this theory, I have analyzed a feasible scenario. A police officer, trained in the art of upholding stability in the fragile framework of society, is encountered with a crazed man holding a hostage at gunpoint. The perpetrator, sweating feverishly, grits his teeth while his mind works with great instability to construct some sort of thought.  The policeman aims his gun at the perpetrator, his level contemplation somewhere between Earth and oblivion while the hostage, with only a prayer for conviction, stares at the police officer. Emotions running on kerosene, the police officer realizes that the perpetrator is mentally unstable. He knows that there is no reasoning and that the gunman only wants to kill, no questions asked. In the midst of his panic and emotional furies, the police officer fires, as his gun spews sparks, fire, and a requiem. In deliberation, the outcome of such a situation can have multiple conclusions, most conclusions being undesirable. Thus fear is emitted from not knowing which conclusion to expect. 
	Vagueness leads to fear. When I do not understand a certain matter, I fear it. Therefore, fate has commanded upon me a great fear. Fate, the belief in destiny, leads me to question what my life will become. The thought that my life could become a vast confusion of turmoil threatens my very sanity. Above a pyre cast ablaze to burn the witches of a less canny era, I have seen the ones who set the very fire tremble in fear of the retribution that those witches may wish to seek. 
                Her soul, those eyes, and her stare has made me vulnerable. I am a wretched raven, with one wing broken. My frayed life holds on by a black thread as cars speed past my twitching body. Death beats its dreadful drums as malevolent clouds drift in the sky like battalions. Love is the one true thing that leaves me vulnerable. I can only fear the most devastating of consequences when I am vulnerable, for I do not even have rationality to commit the most sufficient actions. Vulnerable to everything, I am mesmerized by those eyes. 
                I have on many occasions taken time to think about the removal of fear from my mind. Thoughts about Buddhist Mountains where peace revels beyond their barriers have long obfuscated the fear within me. And in those moments where the mountain air is pure and the horizon holds no ambiguity, I know the veracity of a dream. Too sedated to know what manifestations a drop of water can behold on a solemn mind, fear can only trek a hollow and unfamiliar ground when I am away in those mountains, gazing at a crystalline sky for salvation.
               In retrospect, in that dream with the sun, I could feel something other than fear. Beyond the placid stillness of the sky and the dry dirge that cast a living dance upon dead minds, I could feel some other emotion that I would like to call inexplicable. I think that there might have been an acceptance. There might have been an acceptance in fate and an acceptance that all of my failures no longer held any meaning. Love would fade to black like the foreboding sky. I knew that it would not hurt, that the flash of the sun’s explosion would quickly erase my life.


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