I used to be afraid of very few things. When I was a child I pretended to be afraid of swing sets and falling out of moving vehicles, but really I was aware of how brave I was. I would ride horses. I would climb trees. I would get lost in the woods.
As I got older, taller, bigger and less outspoken, I started developing other strange fears to replace the old ones. I was no longer comfortable with the ocean pulling the sand from beneath my feet as the waves retreated back into the sea. It felt to me, like it wanted to take me with it. The idea of the moon’s gravitational pull, tugging back the ocean to expose its tide pools and thoughts and feelings, little living secrets, made me nervous.
Similarly, I stopped cloud-gazing and staring at the stars, which I used to find hopeful and beautiful. I was on a friend’s ranch one time, and looked up, out of the absolute darkness, and saw so many stars I thought that’s all there was, that I was in space, alone, hurling along like some kind of a sci-fi nightmare. It felt like suffocating.
We are taught to require a modest house in a modest neighborhood, where children can play and trees are sequestered into neat, attractive rows. Sometimes, when I’m driving down over a hill and I can see a basin beneath me, I remember that all of this used to be underwater, and there they are, those houses that stubbornly stick up on the hill like unwanted barnacles, dominating the landscape.
We are born red-faced and screaming, and we stay this way- dominant and needy, pure emotional little wrinkly beings until we are ruler-slapped into submission and put into little boxes that are full of boundaries and rules and then given our inbred, inborn self-centeredness that We are all that matters. This world is ours for the taking. Dinosaurs died for a reason.
In my backyard, there is a crepe myrtle. It is feeble. It’s little blossoms constantly fall, as if choosing death to escape the heat, and they fall to the ground, where they are trampled, or they choose death by drowning and float into the pool where they are ultimately sucked into the filter or scooped out by a net. When I was a kid, I used to pluck the big, resistant ones off a different tree that grew near our old house, and then I would turn them over, little pink frilly dresses, and play ballroom with them. Sometimes these little princesses would go on adventures in magnolia-leaf boats with an acorn captain, and they’d sail down the wild river, doomed to wander the seas eternally.
The poor crepe myrtle in my backyard is so tired. It’s tired because it doesn’t belong there. He was put there on purpose, to help break up the monotony of the concrete and rock, so he’s manicured and planted. I can’t help but noticing the exhaustion in more of the inappropriately placed plants in Texas. At some points in the summer, you look outside and see brown grass on the median, brown trees, gray-smoggy-ozone-warning skies, and from inside your artificially cold car, it’s like winter. When you step outside, you feel the hot air hit you in the face, it’s a lie, all lies.
There is a park near my home that is a swath of land in between neighborhoods that I believe was made into a park as an afterthought. Or perhaps to raise the values of the houses. Nonetheless, there is a “park.” That over there is a “river.” Behind you, behind the fences, you can see trampolines and Irish setters and the occasional abandoned piece of plastic childhood. In this “river” there is a “waterfall” and you can see the little hints of pressed gravel from the tired water running down unenthusiastically. It is not there for nature. That park doesn’t exist for conservation. It is there so people can ride their bikes and run and plug their ipods in and sweat along that concrete sidewalk, more proud of their loss of calories than their commune with the outdoors. The sun is dominant, punishing, and the park closes at dusk, so you can’t even stick around to stargaze or stare down the moon if you wanted to.
Once, on a dare with myself, I watched an eclipse on the internet, out of morbid curiousity, to see if I could handle it. I was so terrified, even as I was sitting in my protective house, aware of the computer, and it was broad daylight. When it happened, in that little box playing on my screen, I lost my breath. It was magnificent, but in a terrible, apocalyptic way. It doesn’t just look like two massive celestial beings matching up- it looks like a damn hole in the sky. It looks like a giant hole in a big black sky, and we’re all going to get sucked up into and spit out into nothing, nowhere, the great beyond. It went on forever. I wildly imagined that he was keeping the sun, that we wouldn’t get it back. Then it was over, and we were done. It came back, of course, a beaming reminder of the divine to shine anew.
I am now afraid of very big things. I can no longer swim in the ocean, and when I’m in my little pressurized cabin gazing at lift off, I can only stare at the dropping sky until I get dizzy and then I shut my window, shut my little world, plug in my ipod and become nothing. Our solar system (please note my overconfident use of the word “our,” we are so self-centered) I find to be impossibly perplexing. I am afraid of big things because I have come to terms with our inevitable irreverence. We are insubstantial. We are not only endangered ourselves, but as an overconfident race, we are quickly using up our resources and damning ourselves, our eternity to a less glamorous fate than we intended. What are we waiting for? I once fought with a friend, who quickly defended the human race, as the beautiful optimist she is. I asked her about Jesus, and when he was coming back, and when he did, what she would be expecting. The second coming of our dear lord obviously equates the apocalypse, so is this what we are waiting for? Even those with the Great Hope Our God are waiting for the end. We’re all waiting for something, for the light to turn green, for the morning to come, for our Prince to come, waiting in the wings to go onstage, or waiting for Jesus to come back and take us away from this place. That must be why we are using up all we got while we’re here.
I have a more practical view of the matter. We will be undone, our songs unsung, and we will neatly be replaced. We will return to dust. We put our dead back in the Earth, and she eats us up; we offer our bodies so she can get that carbon and iron and nitrogen and calcium, yum, taste that sapid flesh. As far as the parts of us we can’t see-that electricity that makes our synapses fire up and that ever-elusive soul everyone’s going on about, I’m not sure what happens to those. I suppose if you have a God you can trust he’ll take care of your luggage, make sure you get it later after you’ve touched down in your final destination and de-boarded, but as for the rest of us, we’re all just floating along, sometimes bumping into each other and experiencing momentary touches and connections, but for the most part, we’re alone.
I am afraid of very big things. I found a word recently- chromomentrophobia. Fear of time. I am not afraid of the physical prowess of the great beyond, and I am not even afraid of that stinging salt water itself, but more or less the notion that it will be there long after I am. My inevitable path hurtling along towards mortality terrifies me, because it means I won’t be around to see the end. The second coming. The Big bang. Armageddon. Nuclear Holocaust. I am disappointed, because I just want to know how it ends.
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