Fearless terror, Underground sky.

Did you know you can believe you’re dying and be calm? You’re certain as can be but it doesn’t bring on waves of panic. No catastrophe – shrug your shoulders, keep moving with the tide. It’s a place holder waiting for your name, and when it’s put down it just settles into the spot.

I think of it as a kind of fearless terror. It is life sped up to the point that it becomes an apparently motionless singularity, so dense with everything about you that things lose their gravitational force. Your perspective gets fixed in place in an odd way because there is nothing to measure your relative position against.

It’s profound disconnection that goes beyond the normal shadows we notice, beyond the ebb and flow of everyday tides of emotion.

It doesn’t connect up with feeling low or joyful or anything much in between. It’s more like sifting the sands of time and feeling everything flowing through you so fast, so constantly, so absolutely that you must let go or burn your hands raw and still not be able to hold your course.

The presence of nothing intrudes upon your breath, sinking it inward. The things which bring you back seem otherworldly even though they could not be more commonplace. Crickets chirp through the night, and you hear them but cannot muster the je ne sais quoi to answer.

Reality bends a little at this point – you think you are invincible because there doesn’t seem anywhere farther to go. It might be called the Restaurant at the End of the Universe or the Call of the Abyss. Beyond has already happened so what could there be to fear?

And then you turn your head to face the sun again only you’re not sure how to let it in any more. At least, not without ending up even more entangled.

So you spin in place, revolving round empty corridors filled with your ghosts. Leaving that behind seems almost charitable, if it weren’t for the insistent calling of your heart.

Lit from within those corridors look less empty but there is still so much vast space. What do you do with all that emptiness? Because knowing it will change does not bring the rain.

Do you open a window for fear? Sit down and have a cup of tea with terror…? Or do you duck and weave, a boxer in a fight with destiny, knowing full well you cannot leave the ring nor land a single blow?