My Feet Are Burning Holes in the Ground

Life & death are things you just do when you're bored...

We were sitting listening to a John Cale record. And I explained that John Cale was the guy from the Velvet Underground. The one who wasn't the chick drummer. Or the dead guy. Or Lou Reed.

The other one.

And she stared at me with those green eyes. The kind you could imagine yourself falling into and drowning. “What if,” she said, “there’s no such thing as fear?”

“But I know there’s fear. I’ve experienced fear. Fear and I are on a first-name basis.”

“What if that’s not a thing?” she said.

“That’s not possible.”

“What if it’s just a story? Something we tell each other?”

“Then it’s the worst and stupidest story in history.”

*****


My father once said to me “What will happen if you lose your job and your car is stolen and you don’t have insurance and there are wildfires that make your allergies act up and you can’t breathe and the Chinese fire nukes, and you have to live under a railroad trestle?”

And I said the only thing you can say to something like that: “No problem. I’ll jump onto my magic unicorn that poops money and ride off taking shortcuts on double rainbows to a magic valley where everything is wonderful 24 hours a day.”

*****

“But what if there is no such thing as fear?” she said again.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. So she continued. “What if fear is taking the worst thing that hasn’t yet happened and suffering through the consequences of it before it happens when you don’t even know that it’s going to happen? What if fear is a process that only exists in your mind that keeps you from enjoying the life you want?”

“I don’t know. What would that mean for all the things I’ve feared for my entire life?”

“It means they crumble into dust. And blow away.” Then she smiled.

And I realized it also means not being afraid of drowning in those green eyes.