Featherlight

Prologue

They say all humans are born with only two fears. The fear of loud sounds and the fear of falling.

The first one is easy to understand. A logical fear. When we are babies, loud noises are scary because they represent something bigger than us, they are symbols of harm and danger. Representations of the danger our parents or guardians failed to protect us from. Dangerous things.

Not all is real, like the imaginary monster in the closet or under the bed. Some loud noises are more afraid of us than we are of them. Like Sully and Mikey. Others are very very real and most of us unconciously cross our fingers and toes that we wilk never ever have to face wherever that noice is coming from. Like staring into the barrel of a loaded gun.

The second fear fascinates me. Falling. A fear that also originates from  a lack of size and helplessness. The fear of being dropped as an infant and getting hurt. As a toddler, the fear of falling down when you start to walk, or maybe tumbling down the stairs when you start to crawl as a baby. Or breaking your arm when learning to ride a bike without training wheels.

As a teenager, maybe letting your secret stash of pot or coke fall into the wrong hands. Or falling pregnant and letting the hopes your parents had for you all fall down the drain. As an adult, letting important information fall into the wrong hands and causing irreparable damage. And as a elderly person, the simple tripping in the shower could be fatal. Funny how the circle of life starts and ends with similar, trivial things.  

Then, as we grow older, our number of fears increase.

Like me. I have acrophobia. Severe fear of heights. It kind of attaches to the fear of falling, I suppose, but the thing about acrophobia is that it makes you think unrealistic. Especially when you watch too much TV. Being on a large balcony, overlooking the sea, enjoying the view and then suddenly having a thought: what if this thing collapses under us at this very moment?

Nothing to break your fall and everything will come crashing down on you. All at once and nobody would have suspected a thing. Like the bridge at the school a few years ago, that collapsed onto oblivious school children walking underneath it.

I would have liked to imagine or live in a world where our fears are nothing but suspicious fantasties and telenovelas. Where phobias cannot collapse the safe little life you have built for yourself and make it all topple down on you. Unexpected, but deadly.

But alas, I cannot. Maybe it is because my world was never quite safe, or maybe it is because I made the (not so obvious) dangerous choices and realized my mistake only when the balcony started cracking.

Now, I am standing on an ever shrinking legde of cracked concrete and all I can hope for, is for something or someone to be there the catch me when I tumble down.