That which i fear is simply me.

What if we all just walked away. We just quit. Because that is what peace is, isn’t it? Quitting. The act of saying i’m through.

Walk away now. Do we have a canonized chance if we can just walk away. To take our dreams and toss in the unused towel. To do that which is completely abhorrible and nowhere near honorable. Can we pull loose our tie, unbutton our oxford and just stride out into the stopped traffic, revealing not spandex screen-printed with an "S" but a bare chest. To say this is who/what i am.

What is so inexplicably amazing about this life that is worth holding on to with our finger nails digging into its safe arms like talons with ratcheted tendons. What is so tenaciously “worth it” that what comes next can’t compare?

I’m not talking about suicide. I’m talking about the simple fear of death.

Safety. Comfort. The only things we know. The end of all we know. Dead men tell no tales, and this is true. If we aren’t alone then none who have gone before are coming back to tell us. It’s either so saturatingly great that a backwards glance isn't even merited or . . . or we simply cease to be.

And what do we cease to be?

What is so special about our names that they can’t be ruined? What is it about honor and life and trust that makes us into the greatest of actors, preforming our opus on the stage of life, only to take the final bow as we lean into our earthen beds. All we really are is the salt and the dust and the water that has existed before it knew us. Why do i have to be me?

I once walked through the streets of a foreign land only to have everyone stare and mistrust my tall, white frame. Why? Because they didn’t know me. They didn’t know they could trust me. And they were right. They caught me before the curtains had a chance to rise.

Our names are nothing but a simple title for a given character that we have decided to play amongst this group of friends or those coworkers. He’s funny. She’s shy. They’re so charming. What a prick. We cling to this existence we call life because it is “real” and what we “know”, all the while the very thing for which we fight is based upon something that is as wholly fictional as the world to come.

No one knows what happens when we die.
And no one really knows me.

No one.

We all have our guesses and comfort-driven hopes that buy us some modicum of false security. But in the end we all exhale alone and march into that from which we were born: the silenced nameless.

Is it not interesting that we trust falsified security over the definite unknown.