Expectorant

I admit I was somewhat bored, and ill at ease. I scanned through the personals the way a person glances at the vegetable aisle. There, among the late bloomers and the bookworms, was this: What are you most afraid of? by some random guy.

It was daring, brash, and inevitably caught the eye. I coughed to cover my interest in the event that anyone should be passing by. Here was an invitation to a dark part of the night one doesn’t particularly care to explore alone, and equally, hates to share with others. It stood out as an offer, an allusion, of mutual understanding: Someone was willing to lend an ear!

There in the confessional of anonymity one could profess anything, and back away, languidly, into introspection. Had I been honest? thoroughly candid? did I dig deep enough to poke the ego, or was it to become just another superficial scar?

I imagined answering, and it was like cheating, on myself. These things that I keep closeted, even from me, my self, which lives in my skin, in an apartment all by itself, with a solitary key. I say “itself,” as me, so that you can all better identify with my perdicatment. Sex is of course intrinsic, but what of it? In situations like this we are all eunuches, male or female alike, equally tangled up in the plight.

So what was I so afraid of ...? I could see something forming in the back of my mind glowing with red eyes, and taunting me. It had to be brought up, and when it was it would likely be with blood. I was suddenly once again acutely aware of our mortality and the sense of drowning. I was on the brink of reaching for my phone, like a raft, to rationalize the thing out, when instead I found myself in my own handkerchief gagged. I shortly after passed out, and when I awoke the tv was advertising insurance, urging one to get a quote because the-only-thing-one-has-to-fear is fear itself, as the sheets were being stripped off the bed.

That is all I’ve remembered, in my effort to make a clean breast of it in private, on the reverse of this drycleaner’s receipt. I returned home shortly thereafter, on my own recognizance, and resumed, as might be suspected, an ordinary life.

07.07.2020

What are you most afraid of ? challenge @SomeRandomGuy