The Green Monster

A tiny tentacle creeped out
From behind.
And grabbed on, held on,
No slight.
"Harmless", they thought.
The monster smiled.
And readied itself,
For another strike.

They floated ahead,
The tentacle forgotten.
Repressed, Restrained,
Uselessly begotten.
In a world golden,
Red and untroubled.
A sudden flash of green
Unknown, on the surface bubbled.

Desire, want, unprecedented.
Ill, sick, unholy.
Gushing through every vein
Tentacles tightening, unduly.
Securing its grip,
Digging deep.
Right till the soul
The green essence seeps.

Suffocating, smothering
The tendrils, the fumes unbidden.
Feeding on their own fears
Both unknown, and those hidden.
Slowly, engulfing their whole,
No means of escape, no rationale.
The green monster emerges,
And all else fails.

Why do we hide, Bruce?

The winds blew the blue curtains at his window into a messy, convoluted mess. Bruce shivered in his bed, and tossed on to the other side, facing away from the window. The blanket was thick, but it wasn’t helping him keep warm. ‘Count down from 100.’ It always worked. 100. 99. 98. 97. ‘What was that?’ Something flew near his window, but it was too dark to make anything out. Bruce pulled the blanket over his head and started counting again. 96. 95. 94.

The whistling wind broke his concentration. He slowly moved the blankets to peek out of the blanket. The darkness was opaque. Bruce quivered a little. ‘Horrible vantage point. Need to know how to get a better one.’ Another movement. ‘Must not be fearful. Must check it out.’ The branches moved in a weird manner. The moonlight lit up a few of them, and their shadows hid all the others. Bruce climbed out of his bed and slipped into his coat. Cautiously, he walked to the window. The branches made queer shapes. The wind kept changing the branch that was receiving the light. ‘Things are darker in the light.’

When he looked down, Bruce couldn’t see the ground. When he looked up, the only thing he could see was himself, flying in the clouds.  Something moved in the woods outside. Quick, and bright. Bruce wondered what it was. He felt the fear wash over his mind. The dull numbness in the back of his head suddenly grew sharp; his heart started beating faster, and faster still; he could feel a weird sweat trickle down his neck. ‘Fear must be conquered.’ His dad always told him that fears must be faced, but Bruce knew that there were only 2 possibilities when it came to fear- you conquer it, or it destroys you. And Bruce knew, in his gut, he knew, that this darkness had to be conquered.

Bruce tiptoed out into the woods. The rustling of the leaves and the whooshing of the branches were the only sounds he could make out, apart from the screeching winds. He waited at the boundary for a little while, gathering courage, courage and strength. It was a cold night. ‘Just see what it is, that is all.’ Every crevice and nook seemed alive to him. The vegetation that normally looked warm and welcoming to him in the day suddenly started taking shapes that beckoned him to leave, to run, far, far away. A sharp movement on his left made the air get caught in his larynx. Instinctively he ran towards his right, the only sounds buzzing in his ears were those of his own heavy breathing, and of his heavy footsteps crunching the dried leaves. A sudden whisper of the wind at his neck made him scream out loud, but he kept his balance, and kept up his pace. He ran in further, in to the darkness, in to the void.

Just a few rays of the morning sun managed to penetrate through the canopy and reach the floor of the woods. Bruce realised that there was fallen tree a few step ahead. ‘Hide in the trunk.’ Bruce ran faster than he ever had. In one swift movement, he was inside the trunk. He heaved a sigh of relief, and closed his eyes. A low hiss made the hair on the back of his head stand. Slowly he opened his eyes, and saw in the darkness, thirty, small glowing balls of light. A small gasp escaped his mouth, but the dominoes had already begun falling. The bats flew right at him, squealing, sharp, and out of the opening, in to the light. Bruce had hidden his face in between his thighs, but he felt each of the bats’ wings on his head. Fear had frozen all his other senses. He could still feel their wings on his head, but he knew they were long gone. ‘They are gone. They are gone, don’t be scared.’ He breathed. ‘Fear is the strongest driving force. Fear doesn’t need to be eradicated. Just harnessed.’ Bruce was lost in fear, but in a completely different way now.

He heard his name being called in the distance. He didn’t move. He felt himself being pulled out of the trunk, he heard Alfred’s doting voice wash over his being. Thomas hugged Bruce.

“I hid. I was scared. I was scared. So I hid.”

Thomas held Bruce’s hand, and looked at him.

“Why do we hide, Bruce? So we can finally find ourselves.”

Why am I scared?

I have always been someone who hides. Not myself, no. I used to do that as a kid, but not since adolescence. I hide my thoughts, if I don’t know you; I hide my feelings, if I am not comfortable; I hide my fears, no matter what; I hide my past, because I cannot face it myself. There are a million times that I am unable to sleep, because of something unnamed, something lingering in the back of my head. It brings tears to my eyes, makes my head grow heavy and sends shivers down my spine, but I can never put a finger to it. I am going to be honest and blunt. I am quite certain that that is a little, if not a lot, messed up. But that doesn’t change the fact that that happens.

I say I hide, because I do. Sometimes, I hide behind lies, sometimes behind pretences, and sometimes I hide behind thin veils. I hide behind foods and injuries. I hide behind the ambiguities of my words, behind cleverly (or so I hope) created characters and themes and plots. I hide behind my own words, and make them seem like someone else’s. I hide, so I don’t have to face that which I hide from.

A couple of weeks ago, I was obsessed with the thinking of a particular heinous kind of people. I was trying to rationalize in my mind a certain fear, the biggest fear in my mind, and I was trying to work my way backwards, as the perpetrator, because thinking forward hadn’t helped me in any manner. Thinking forward, thinking normally, just made me more scared, it made me more and more vulnerable, more blind. Blind with fear, I mean. I was losing sleep, which is a very effective coping mechanism for me usually, until the moment that it avoids me at all costs and effects, and becomes exactly what it protects me against. I am not saying that nightmares would leave me be at times like this, they wouldn’t. Nightmares are, and have always been an avid part of my life, I have had nightmares about almost every fear I have ever harboured. But nightmares are easy to recover from. Lack of sleep, not so. There were times that I would avoid sleeping to avoid nightmares. I am sure we’ve all done that. (I hope.) But now, I am okay with nightmares as long as I can sleep, because in dreams (or nightmares), I am away from the realities of my past. And closer to my fears.

Anyway, that obsession led to another one, a more rooted one, to be honest. I realised that in order to rationalize my biggest fear, I need to rationalize fear itself. So one fine day, I sat down to do that. And I came up with nothing. Why? Because I was too scared to think about the things that scare me. I made a lot of realisations about fear, and I put them into a story and hid my being from there too. But this piece, I am penning, because I owe it to myself. I owe it to myself, and my fears, to my demons, that I acknowledge them. That I acknowledge the fact that I am scared. I am scared in broad day light, not just in the darkness. I am scared in company and in solitude. I am scared in tears, as I am scared in laughter. I am scared when I realise that horrors are not that far away. I am scared when I realise what I can live with. What I can overcome.

That should give me a sense of satisfaction, shouldn’t it? That I am stronger than what I thought I was? That I have faced my fears and thus conquered them? No. I realise now, that it doesn’t work that way. The fears you face, stay with you. Just because you have faced them once, doesn’t mean you aren’t scared anymore. The scars aren’t always those of victory, they are those of suffering, and whether they are visible or not, they are there. Not acknowledging them will take you nowhere. Ignoring them, ignoring your past will not help you move on- neither forward, nor backward. You will be stuck, in the same place where you were. Or probably will slip towards a chasm, that you will know nothing about, even when you are in it.

Then what the hell do you do? You acknowledge it: your past, your fear, your present, your hopes, your desires. No matter how silly, stupid, dark, or irrational they maybe, acknowledge them. Whether you can do something about them, whether you can deal with them or not doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does. But recognizing and accepting in the first step- towards healing, towards success. Towards a better place.

I accept that I am scared. Of what? I will still hide that. But it makes it better just to accept. Accepting makes it easier to breathe. Try it.