I'm Afraid...

Long way back, why long way back?, because the time I'm referring to is my childhood and considering the speed of passage of time, it really was a long time ago, I used to be afraid of darkness. Now you say: “What's the big deal? Nearly everybody's afraid of darkness in their childhood.”

Well that's right, nearly everybody's afraid of absence of light, but I was afraid of darkness not the absence of light. Does it sound crazy? I would say yes, but it's not so.

I used to be afraid of darkness, because I couldn't see anything. I was not afraid of the in-existence of things. I was afraid of them being there and me not being able to know about them. I was afraid, because I didn't know if those invisible for me, at that moment, things were also blind at that moment or if they were looking at me and ridiculing, or even worse planning to manipulate my helplessness.

Had I been sure that everything including me in that given space enjoyed equal opportunities, I might had been a lot more calm and un-scared. Please note I don't mean brave I mean not scared or taken a little bit out of the scare. But alas that was not the case. Strangely enough no two parties, to a situation, are always in equal status. Getting back to my childhood, I used to be scared of the table in the dark, because I couldn't see it and I never knew what the table did, when it was dark. I couldn't be sure that the dead piece of wood, with nails hammered into every possible hole, called the table, was all that dead. Maybe it pretended to be dead and as soon as the lights went out, it opened it's wicked eyes and stared, at the scared to hell loaf of meat called “ME”.

During the long dark nights, filled with fear, I used to think and tried to find a way out of my helplessness in regard to that nasty, nail prone, living it out in the dark table. Now I'm writing about those times, when I didn't even know about the times in which I'm writing. So for me in the past, the future was also a patch of darkness, where there were tables and maybe not only tables, waiting for me to stumble and fall. I was not afraid of stumbling, or even of falling. It never hurts when you fall, unless you don't fall out of the 14th floor balcony. But what really hurts is the laughter or even the slight smile that you see on the faces of the bystanders or passersby. When you stumble in the light, you see those smiles and you feel hurt, but when you stumble in the dark and you hear those laughters and can only imagine those smiles spread from ear to ear, you feel more hurt, because you never know, who is laughing and who is not.

So after long painstaking thinking sessions I came to a conclusion, which could shed my fears: my fears related to darkness. I thought that It won't be bad if I could start seeing in the dark. Back then, and how long ago it sounds although it was just a few decades ago not even centuries, I didn't know that seeing had something to do with the light. I used to think that if the power, which comes out of the eyes and helps me see, would end one fine day, what would I do then? For me the blind were the people whose eyes couldn't emit that power of vision. So for me the matter of seeing in the dark remained very practical and I tried to find out how it could be done.

In the process of trying to know, I discovered that the eye did not emit anything, but on the contrary it absorbed. Now that was a single ray of light in the dark jungle of my ignorance. This ray of light changed the course of my thoughts. I understood that eyes were receivers not transmitters. I checked the table to discover that the poor bastard didn't have any eyes. So for it, the matter of receiving the scene of me falling, was no less a fairy tale than was, seeing in the dark, for me. But once again my fears never left me all together, because the table was not the only thing that I feared, in the dark. There were the ghosts, who strangely enough, even being so scary, were afraid of the light, the genies, who although were almighty, still couldn't scare the dunk out of me in the light. The light seemed to be the answer to all fears and scares, but what was light?

My fear of darkness dawned the light of knowledge on me. As I grew up I kept on fighting my fears with the light(of knowledge)saber. I won one battle after the other against my fears, learning to learn and to use the acquired knowledge. As I grew up, I couldn't eliminate the darkness, but I shattered its force against me. The darkness didn't scare me anymore. I even learned to enjoy the moments of dark, but bright, serenity. I learned about the nature and I learned about attraction. I understood that light without darkness would be inexistent and that life without death would also be a misery. But I looked at it the other way around and understood that dying before you start living is even more miserable. I learned to enjoy the unknown instead of being scared of it. I overcame the darkness inside of me and with that I overcame my fears.

But after I won my war against the darkness, I started realizing that there are things even more scary then the invisible ghost. For example I used to be afraid of dogs, specially the big ones with those scary teeth and slimy drooling mouths. Well the fear of dogs didn't have anything to do with the light. I could see the dog. I could see its moves, but even if I tried I could not see what was in its mind. The dog could bark out loud and scare the shit out of me, but not bite me or it could be vice-versa. It was once again the unknown, the unknown thoughts, the unknown motives and most of all the unknown abilities.

See the dog could be very straight forward. In that case it would warn me (barking) and then if I would still intrude, he would attack me and try to rip me apart. On the other hand the dog could be very cunning. It could just lay around watching me, until I would be in its reach and then just attack me and rip me apart keeping its eyes just as innocent as they were before it started tearing me apart.

Yes you understood it correctly. It is not the dog that scares me. It is the thought pattern that pushes my balls up to my throat. It is so much more difficult and dangerous than the ghosts of my past. The ghosts were only present in my wild fantasies, but these cunning plans are real and they are not only in the brains of the dogs. There are more than 6 billion people around me and there are more than 6 billion probabilities of fear.

Yes I've grown-up. I've learned a lot. I've defeated the unknown of the dark night. But I'm afraid. I'm afraid of deception. I'm afraid of betrayal. I'm afraid of not being understood. I'm afraid of love. I'm afraid of love coated hatred. I'm afraid of ignorance, but I'm even more afraid of knowledge: The knowledge that leads to destruction, annihilation, disgrace, dishonesty and injustice. I'm afraid of those, who cannot be friends with each other unless they are enemies with someone or something common.

I'm afraid of hypocrisy and hypocrites. I'm afraid of those, who know how to use me and I'm afraid of being used. I'm afraid of lies and I'm even more afraid of liars. I'm afraid of those, who bow in front of me, so that I would turn around and they could stab me effortlessly. I'm afraid of being afraid and I'm afraid of talking about my fears.

Yes I'm so afraid of the visible that I have started loving that laughing at me in the dark, nail prone, dead piece of wood called the table.

I'm no longer afraid of the dark, but I'm dead scared by the dark-side.