terror and blackness

i used to call myself amelia the fearless. it was a silly, false epithet.

being afraid is no crime. it matters more how we see through those fears. use them. climb all over them. slice them up and build fires with them.

it is light we must fight back with. on our wall of Emerson upstairs there is a line, "fear always springs from ignorance." the final S of springs is squished up against the rest of the word, floating awfully above the baseline so its tail will not overlap the G. anyway, knowledge is power. knowledge is fearlessness. but the darkness seems so much bigger. how can the absence so encompass the presence of something? it travels faster than the light... it is always there first... it is the nothing we build all our dreams on top of. the zero that makes all advanced calculations possible. how can we leave that behind?

for the sake of fearlessness. for the sake of conquering the demons we find, the ones that were already there but needed some spark to really be seen. training our eyes to see more, further, and to stand the brightness.

so here i stand, holding a candle. it isn't the only candle. it's not anything magnificently bright or beautiful. but it's mine. will it be enough to eat through the black, empty future?

i'm hoping i can trade it in sometime, for a nice fluorescent light bulb that will float conveniently over my head. maybe someday far far in the future, if i face all this darkness bravely enough, i will get my very own star.