Two Truths and a Liar

XXIII • Fears, and confrontations

Jenna

_______________________________________

"Jenna, what is man's greatest weakness?"

It was morning, the kind of morning where the sky decides not to breathe and the clouds fall to the ground in heaps of dampened fog. The words of my lesson books blurred in my eyes, the tight lettering a garbled string without meaning and my eight year old mind caught in fluttering curtains dancing over the windows. My hand wrapped around a pen but dormant on my desk. I looked up at my teacher, eyes swimming with reflection.

"What?"

"You weren't listening," He dropped the heavy book he had held in his arms onto my desk, and standing before the worn chalkboard sighed.

"What is man's greatest weakness?"

Children are quick to remember, and a phrase without meaning to them will easily catch in their minds, repeating like silly poems and meaningless words, sing-song and light.

"Man's greatest weakness is his self obsession, and appetite for destruction."

"And do you think that is all?"

"Um," I scrawled on my paper and glanced out the window, unsurity creeping in. "Yes,"

"Are you not considering that it might be much more than that?"

"Like what?"

"You have read, yes, arrogance and violence. But what about the obvious? Doesn't a man's fear bring him down as well?" 

I blinked. He continued, turning his back, smearing chalk across the surface of the board with words directed back to me. I followed his movement, watching as the form morphed with every swipe and circular motion.

"His fear?"

"False fear. Fear of death, of pain, of the unknown. Tell me,  what is it you fear?"

I bounced in my seat a little and peered at the ceiling as I thought.

"Snakes,"

"Oh?"

I hadn't noticed the look on his face, that he was jotting something down mentally and putting it away for later use. 

"And how can you get over this fear?"

"I don't know,"

A problem or threat into fear. He spelled a word branching off of fear. Confrontation.

"The only way to abolish fear is through confrontation," He tapped the board between every few syllables, words curt and staccato.

"Although there is…"

He wrote another word, beside confrontation, under fear. 

"Avoidance. Which will get you nowhere except in trouble or still seeped in fear. But confrontation-"

Two words he branched off of it.