"Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then the little drops of anguish will all run together, the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into me, choking my lost heart."
- Pablo Neruda, Don't Go Far Off
Fear, in my experience, is as powerful a motivator as love. The pair are but two sides of a single coin. Intertwined and interchangeable. There cannot be one without the other. That thing, that despairingly soul-crushing angst that what you have is nothing more than a fugacious moment in time, dissipating into the ether. That loss is inescapable and ineluctable. It is a suffocating realization. A haunting inevitability that chokes you, weighs you down, torments you through every moment of happiness, every ephemeral juncture of elation or euphoria.
The unavoidable terror of the thought of losing the person, or people, that mean the most, are closest to you can smother you, snatch your breath away. Razor-edged, piercing agony rips through your entire body, and you are paralyzed. Adrift in a sea of despair, self-loathing and deep-running, soul-destroying terror. Paranoia that plagues your every waking moment. An unwelcome nightmarish visitor in the fits of restless sleep. Taunting your subconscious, always there, just under the surface, jeering, teasing, mocking you endlessly, relentlessly.
Until you are nothing more than a shell of the person you once were, left contemplating who this person is that you have become. Utterly impotent in the face of heart-wrenching despair. An unconditionally terrifying and overwhelming experience.
- M xx
