April 05, 2021
My Biggest Fear
Silly cat says: "Everybody's afraid of something"
I don't normally print my Steppin' Out columns in my blog..but this weeks is all about what happened and because I have to be at work in an hour, I figured it would be easiest to reveal my biggest fear, the way I reveal it in my "Hot Wax" column...This won't come out on the web or in the magazine 'til Thursday so it's like a sneak peak sort of thing.
Although since writing this I realize I have one other really big fear. But I'm not ready to share that one just yet. So..here's the story:
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“What’s your biggest fear?” He’s been asking me this question for the last two months. “You have to fear something above everything else.” Only, I can’t come up with an answer, at least not at first. After all, he’s my flova, not my shrink. Okay, that’s not why I don’t answer; the truth is I don’t answer because I don’t know what I would call MY BIGGEST FEAR. Even if I’ve never understood the concept of death, and if I’d spent nights as a child thinking about never coming back –about forever and ever and ever, I still don’t think I know my biggest fear.
This weekend he brings it up again. “Have you thought about your biggest fear?” I stop and stare at the boy whose presence has changed my life forever, and because of him I begin to understand. All of a sudden I know the answer.
My biggest fear is the end.
The end of everything. The end of relationships, of the world, of me.
We’ve hit the nail on the head.
So now I’ve just told my flova that I fear the end of relationships, and he understands that this means our relationship as well. And although we’ve gotten along swimmingly so far, and we have no reason to think about the end right now, he knows that I constantly do. “You need to stop being afraid of these ends,” he tells me. “Because if you don’t stop, you’ll accelerate what’s inevitable.”
Is he referring only to our relationship, or maybe life in general?
Then we joke about testing our ends. Only we don’t realize we’re not joking.
We get to the “horned ball” before most other people arrive. We stay in a corner, and as the party picks up, we move to the back of the bar. There we see her, his ex, the last girl he dated, the girl who just months before, while we were dating, propositioned him for one more night of sex, and my mood changes.
She sees us -- I cringe, and this doesn’t seem to bother her at all. She walks over, he re-introduces us, and my beach ball version of life immediately deflates. And as the ball loses air, I figure this signifies something much larger. I realize things like his life with her had to end before ours could ever begin, and life is a circle of beginnings and ends. Still, he’s never been able to validate me in front of her, and now, tonight I’m testing how far he’ll go.
I leave the conversation and time passes as they continue to talk. Eventually I end their conversation by acting like Amanda Wakefield did in The Glass Menagerie when she realizes the gentlemen caller is not coming back. I show a complete loss of faith and logic, and I realize I’m intentionally trying to destroy this relationship. In layperson’s terms – I freak out.
Is this the end?
We both become conscious of the fact that I’m trying to end this relationship before its time so I can avoid dealing with the attachment and emotion that come along with fostering what we’ve got. In fact, that’s what I do to every relationship I’ve had these past six years.
And after hours of conversation, and the knowledge of my destructive behavior, I’m working towards enjoying him now. If my biggest fear is the end, I have to accept that it’s going to eventually come. After all, it’s only when you let go of fear and how things will end that they can ever really begin.