Another rainy day. He thought it was always like that, that the rain suppressed a certain stimulus of his brain’s machinery. It was as if his brain was composed of strips of paper that shriveled when they became wet.
He was okay. He slept well, and awoke with the noise of the rain trapped between his ears. It was a synaptic reaction, completely unconscious. His mood fell further, and he thought that maybe it was better to not get out of bed.
But he did, because of his sense of duty to the job. And that’s how his thoughts tricked him. They hurled him towards dark thoughts, towards a new dictum for his life. “You should wait until the end to render a verdict”, his other voice told him. But it doesn’t matter, his thoughts continued, ignoring the other possibilities his mind screamed out. There’s nothing to lose.
He thought of his sense of duty to his job, of the word “duty”, of all his obligations, not only the financial ones, all his financial debt drowning the sanity in his house in between screams and threats, and the obligatory tension arising within the ascetic pecuniary climate that accompanies every recession. It was the word “duty” as antonym of liberty, as its opposite force. Duty as chains, as expectations. That’s why he admired artists, because they had no obligations, except towards their art. The rest could burn as a meteorite of indifference. But that wasn’t him: his artistic underpinning crushed by his scientific duty; his artistic capacity drowned by expectations. Always living off the expectations. Even if he denied it, even if he boasted that his life was his and he was in command, he knew the reality of it all: the stares full of disdain; the sarcastic, ironic or duplicitous comments; the feigned support that was later withdrawn when threatened.
That’s how he lived.
And it was when he met Her that he felt a breadth of fresh air, a sense of liberation. For nothing. So that in the moment of truth, he would continue living off the expectations. So that when the time came, he would return to this role as an agonizing protagonist, victim of his destiny, about to obtain his liberty, but afraid of the final jump. Why?
Because he was afraid. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don't”. Because he wouldn’t risk losing everything to gain everything. Because a glimmer of doubt grew like a cancer. A doubt silenced by a whispered “I love you”; a doubt that, in the absence of these words, eclipsed everything else.
Afraid. That’s how he lived his life.
Georges DiStefano Folly
The Book of Absent Fears
