When...

Assignment: Turn fears into affirmations.

How exactly do you propose I do that?

My fears are slippery and always changing with no visible finger holds. To get a grip on one is as difficult as holding onto an electric eel, wrestling it in my grip while biting my tongue through the pain. My fears morph from slow rolling hills into acute edges, all right angles and biting pokes and prods so constant and ever impressing upon my goose pimpled flesh a custom brand of jagged and lumpy scars. Scars are pain and pain is equal to the sum of my unfruitful attempts at creating a sound life, a sound sanity, a sound...at all.

My fears force me to look at life from behind the dark reds of stained glass, through muffled highway noises of an existence I can't quite reach. It's just there right outside these stains, clear glass just out of my reach. This pain in my mind and in my body, this body-minded pain, it is nothing compared to the pain being pumped out of my four-chambered heart, that is coursing through my veins trying to clot my scars but too thin to succeed. My fear is the reminder that I will never be enough. Enough for who, I don't know. But not enough for myself so not ever enough for everyone else.

It hurts to feel but so much more it hurts to hope. Hope is an empty word, empty and sinking to murky depths. At times buoyant enough to play with my unrest, to be just there, courageously treading water but only able to take one breath of air and the next breath is ocean filling its lungs and the life boat it had preserved. Hope does not float for long and my fear is a tri-athlete; fast on land, dangerous on wheels, and cunning in the water.

Every night my fears are wet pillows, dampened from moisture of the saline kind. The natural kind secreted from a hole smaller than a pin head and that as nimbly as a thimble roll down the obstacles of my freckled face like a skier dodging trees. Every morning my fears are loneliness being slow brewed into a coffee pot stained with the same dark red. It does not matter what I choose to wear every day because my wardrobe is made of searing shame and bewildered blame; how did I get here and why didn't you stop me?

My fears are paper clips and tape and staples and post it notes attached to my body and belongings reminding me to never become you. To never forget the septic love you breathed in my lungs, that still sits in wait every moment of every day.

My fear is not that you didn't know giving me your poison would kill me. My fear is that you did.

Assignment: Turn fears into affirmations.

AFFIRMATION: That was then.