-FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT

                                       
                                                      Fear Can Have A Voice

             Fear can have a voice, and sometimes it says, “Fuck you.  Leave me alone, Bitch.”

            At least that’s what you tell yourself, going blind to the hatchet in your heart, blood trickling down your ribs aphid-slow.

            “I hate you,” is Fear’s twin or Fear not being done for the night.  Often Fear’s remarkable endurance supersedes Fear itself in the catalog of what terrifies you most.

            Other people have frightened you before, other words have been jagged spires launched from a slingshot at your eyes and mouth, but you are not so young anymore.  You have grown your own set of tree rings.

            This Fear has a different energy, though.  An urgency.  It’s greedy but also inconsistent and confusing, like a Rorschach inkblot where no clear image emerges, and so you’re left waiting for more code to appear, to decipher.

            But it’s when Fear’s words fold up their tent and go mute black that you start thinking-- it might be true this time.  He might really mean it.  You revisit the tenor of Fuck you and Leave me and Hate you.  The words swell in size, becoming gigantic and menacing.  And sure his voice could walk it back in the morning, his marionette could even apologize, but you’ll still remember how his words were fists, barbed knuckle words, and so what’s left in the night’s ensuing silence is a macabre game of Scattergories being played out over the piping red coils in your brain.

            You try telling yourself you still have choices but you know that notion is no more than a hemorrhagic stroke waiting to happen.  You are a nurse.  You know these things.  You’re not stupid like Fear says.

            Still, choice only retains power when its employed, which is why after a civil breakfast where the prior night’s verbal assaults is given no mention, and after his hot coffee-lips brush your forehead before he mumbles, “Goodbye,” you become a busy fish, breaking through the undertow and currents, tossing off tangles of seaweed, avoiding the sharks that might eat you.  You even start to hum as you swim and bundle.  You find a new smile and loan it to your child.  When you ask him if he thinks you look like a fish, the boy giggles and says, “No, Mommy, I think you’re pretty.”

            You decide to believe him.  You decide to be pretty for once. 

When the bags are all loaded in the car, you give your son a long hug, then take his hand, noticing how warm it is, how small. 

You flash another smile and this time it’s not concocted.  You tousle your boy’s hair and say, “It’s time to go.”