Fear

~ Given free reign I might never write a word.  For fear of wrinkled paper. ~

I live, I think, I breathe, concept and conception.

It has been said an image holds a thousand words, but a concept holds a billion pictures.  So much is lost in translation that sometimes as I write I can almost feel the ideas dying.

It's like trying to preserve the beauty of a dancer, by turning her to stone.  Trying to entrap an instant by sacrificing every instant it ever was or ever was to be.  What if, the sacrifice thus made, the dancer was not turned to stone, but sand?  Everything she ever was, lost in an instant.  All to form an instant that, in the instant after, crumbled into dust.  Or what if, frozen for the fullness of forever, the moment captured was the lesser of all the moments lost?

These and a myriad more are the fears that restrain my hand, my heart, my head.  These fears, reasons, excuses.  These are the demons that whisper to my soul.  The fallen angels of my best, and worst, intentions.

Fear.

It is a word that at times seems to all but define me.  Fear of perception, of imperfection, of that first step that once taken could wrench my cozy miseries asunder.

I am trapped, not in a doorless tower, but in a house of a thousand ways.  Unable to choose more then one and therefore unwilling to choose.  Knowing one would lose me all the others, forgetting it would gain me all the more.

The chances I have sacrificed to fear are strewn through my past in endless numbers.  More than I will ever know, as much as I will ever wish.

Wish.

I have wished,

and in the wishing failed to act.

I have hoped, and in the hoping failed to be.

I have feared, and in the fearing all but lost it all.

This is the final page of a million that I might have written.  A million that will never be.

Yet,

it is also the first

of a million more I may yet write.