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Chicken in Reverse | Sep 28 2003

The rain is coming down hard. The sound of it sounds like something sizzling in a pan but with cars swooshing by. Ah, and with a bus, braking.

A new thought: The Buddhists speak of walking with one’s death, but it’s really one’s fear one walks with. Meaning: Everything I do is done to clear out a space for not being afraid, for having the sense that this space around me, the space I walk in and that in a sense emanates from me, is safe. Which obviously it isn’t. The whole thing is an attempt to beat back the truth.

Anyway, one answer to Lorenzo’s question is that I’m afraid of both life and death but more life than death because death is such an abstraction.

Another answer: It’s not death I fear so much as dying, which still counts as life. I don’t even know what counts as death.

And also: I am afraid of both living and not living and so I oscillate between these two fears, living when not living scares me most, not living when living does, back and forth.

This just in from a friend, as if to illustrate:

Still no word from Nancy. Odd, because at the end of our date, when she asked me if we should get together again and I said “sure,” she touched my arm and said “oh, yay” before leaving.

It’s like we’re playing a game of chicken in reverse. Instead of veering toward each other to see who stops first, we’re veering apart to see who’ll be the first to look back.