About Fear

My fear of conflict mutes my words.

My mind, my ears, my eyes, my mouth – they’re open. Agape. Waiting. Wishing. No sound, but there’s a storm in my heart, a wind in my soul. It’s raging, but I can’t speak.

I am afraid.

Discord feels toxic. Naming unsettles. Justice disrupts.

Give us back our comfort. We like this invisibility cloak – these walls we’ve built around us; this shelter we’ve permitted. It’s warm and cozy and far from reality. Wrap us in my security blankets of ignorance and fear. Ease us with those songs of misinformed light we can bear. We like our comfortable boxes where we sit away from the truth and the fires we’ve lit. We like our cheeks as they are. We won’t have them turned to look and see, to drain of colour. We won’t let them be burned by the destruction we’ve laid.

Keep all your stories. Don’t stand in our doorways. We won’t listen. We can’t hear through our hats pulled low; our ears turned off; or eyes squeezed shut. Our feelings and bodies fully numbed and disconnected. We can’t see through the tinted lens we’ve perfected to shut it off and shut you all out.

You all. Them. Those people. We don’t like you, and that’s based on our hate. It’s based on the ugly that soothes us at night, when you try to force us to hear your plight. Our hate says, “you’re wrong; you’re being vindictive; you’re causing the cramp in my side; you want all my pie.” Our indoctrinated, propaganda’d, oppressive hunch is: you’re wrong. And we like being right. We like staying numb and oblivious; comforted and benefitting from the oppression of others. We refuse to acknowledge truth. We will not move. We will not look.

We are afraid.