Fear
This is my final experience of what I call the gnawing. It is the best name I can give it, although it is by no means all encompassing. It is a festering possession of the soul, a clawing from within my essence trying to rip me apart. I can feel I am at my end, that it has won, and this is my reprise.
It began when I was innocent. A child, in mind, body, and soul. Wandering down a lane walked a thousand times to reach home, I encountered pure, unadulterated dread. A feeling at first, of ice crawling from my heart steadily through my extremities until it reached even my fingertips. I remember being unable to scream – and also so confusingly petrified as I could not see what had caused the effect. In fact, I could see nothing. I was rendered blind.
I was eleven.
The feeling went after what could have been a minute, hour, or day, and the world continued to turn. Youthful spirit brushed it off as a simple childhood fear – a ‘bogeyman’ to add to the other monsters under the bed.
It returned when I turned twenty. I remember so clearly, it was the eve of my twenty first birthday, and I had reached my familial home for a visit. I went to knock, again as I had a thousand times before, and froze. The ice grabbed ahold of me, the darkness fell.
This time, there were eyes.
Those eyes haunted me for years after the ice melted. Darkest red in a sea of nothing, seeing through me, yet all of me, and what would become of me. It saw my birth and my death and understood I was meaningless. They mocked my fleeting existence and made me understand how utterly unimportant I was. It did not tell my how or when I would die, but once I saw those eyes – I realised I could die the following day, or eighty years from then, and it would make no difference.
The only difference would be the amount of pain I would experience in the mean time.
Over the years the eyes came again and again, rarely enough for me to hope they had disappeared, frequently enough for me to remember vividly. They swam through my dreams, laughing at what was significant to me. They waited, bored, for me to live my life – the only thing I would experience – as though they were waiting for the next number in line to be called.
The ice has just thawed, and this time it was different. The eyes spoke. They said a single word.
“Now”.
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