the introduction an excerpt from: A BIOGRAPHY OF FEAR jonathan bitz “Unbeknownst to my mother she gave birth to twins: to myself and to fear which has been my constant companion throughout my life." - Thomas Hobbes For centuries mystics have made correlations between the ideas of knowing God and knowing the self. I have never known God. I have never known my self. Now, twenty-seven years into this ride and, I am standing at my front door. I am in such paralyzing pain that I am sloped down to the tips of the wings on my back and hunched over. Like I am carrying an iron weight atop my angelic spread – as though I am being punished by the gods. And if not they, then surely the goddesses. I knock on the door. I don’t hear anything moving in the apartment, so I knock again. I don’t have a key. Then: feet shuffle behind the door. Beads of salt water well-up in my concave temples, now convex. The blood, like a clock – ticking in my sinus cavities. My temples concave. Now convex. The door creaks open. And then, there she is: Maria. The most beautiful girl in the world. Her cheeks are like a china doll's – perfect circles, shimmering. Her brown eyes are spacious; the entire world fits inside them. Her hair is long; a rare and valuable commodity that has had merchant’s envy around the world for decades now. Her figure: striking. Whenever she walks into a room, eyes bat and blink and heads turn. Lips curl upward. And when she speaks… The seasons change. Hi… Her voice crawls under my backbone. She gestures for me to come inside. The floor behind is unkempt – conglomerates of dust and hair blow about in the corners of the hall. Piles of the everyday have accumulated on every namable surface – those flat, round; and even those unnamed. Papers, books, receipts and girl things are littered about the apartment in a torrent only Maria could understand. Or create. Inhale. “I didn’t hear you knocking,” she says. But I only hear, “I am working on the future. You know… my future without you.” The sadness pools-up in the empty rooms of my eyes. I look under the windows with their shades drawn down to find a stack of boxes, some open, some closed. Things launching out the top. The stuff is the last of the sum total of eight years, plus the baggage I carried with me before that – into my apartment. Then it swells behind my sternum and bleeds like a lung: this is not my apartment. This is not my girlfriend. This is not my dust; my door… This place, this space is no longer ours. Mine. We don’t share this life anymore. I want out. Now. “I put everything over there…” But before she can even finish, I squat like a weightlifter and tug at as many of the boxes that I can. From the knees, up. I straighten my back. Like I am strong. Maria laughs. I look to her. Solemn. Stricken. She squints her eyes. “Do you have to be so stubborn, all of the time?” My glare says, “Whaddya mean?” “At least, let me help you take some of those down…” says one of the kindest and often gentlest creatures I have ever touched. No… My obstinate bones say. This isn’t my home. This isn’t our life. And now, I am taking what little is mine – like I have been granted permission by the gods and goddesses to take things with me from one life to the next. And all these little, pathetic things I will take with me – because I have nothing else to hold onto during the jagged nights to come. From here it looks like this: She never belonged to me. And I, never to her. In the flurry that is fleeting life, we only make temporary accommodations. Everything that lives, dies. Everything. I knew this. I know this. I am on my second life and this is not a mantra I need to repeat any longer. Thinking about all the furniture I left for her, I punch the elevator’s button and wait. All of it, I left: The television, couch, bed, nightstands, dressers – all the domestic things we bought together. This is my parting shot: At least I’m leaving her something more than tastes of distrust and the moody man she never could turn around. The elevator arrives. I’m going down. Hard. Down. I already can feel the G-Forces. Without even looking behind me, I can feel her coming – just as clearly and certainly as I had every night for the previous eight years. In our bed. On our couch. In front of our television. Our hopes. Our fears. Our worries. Going down, Maria says, “I still have the box… of photographs.” “You can keep them,” I say kindly. As though that was my true aim. But no, I intentionally misfired – twenty feet from center. She knew, as well as I did, that I was just scared to ever see her face again. Never again. I don’t want to. It’s not mine. “You shot all the photos…” I nod. We both knew that much. “It’s our time together…” She implores. Finally I lift my head, to see her with the last items from our life together, cradled in her arms like the child we never would have together. Sad. Sad. Sad. I nod. I am trying to erase that phrase, “our time together”. But I don’t tell her this. I just stare with Herculean eyes – straight through the glass elevator door. We’re passing the terracotta floors one-by one. I am thinking about the horrible days. When I let her down. When I let me loose. Down. I am reaching up with my eyes for the days we loved. Laughed. Supported. The days when I did not let her down. Down. The ride stops. Maria pulls at the heavy metal gate, slides the glass door back – and we exit. Together. For the last time. Walking down the hall, I turn back once to see Maria – looking over the boxes pressed against her chest. She is smiling. Her crying was done years ago now – when I cut the chord and I was this elevator-weight dropping down on top of her. Crushing. For now, there is no hate here. Just heavy sadness. And that third person standing on my chest; wrapping his hands around my neck. Squeezing. Even when I set the boxes on the back of the truck, I feel this strain. The pain. Without effort, the heat pulses from my gut to my sternum to my eyes. This is the effort involved in losing something you want. Need. Have. Love. I am having a heart attack. I am lovelustcrushed. :: I want excess. I want to look up when I am praying to the heavens for solace, to find big, brilliant mushroom clouds collapsing together and drawing thick shadows on one another, against the blue backdrop of forever. I want to slide across the floor. From what I heard. From what I saw. From my awareness. From my consciousness. From the way SHE kissed me. From the realization that my sharp awareness induced: That SHE was watching me walk down the hallway the whole time. I have always wanted to be moved. I will forevermore want to be moved. By you. I. They. Those. It. That. I want to be blown back, off my knees – blossoms of my prefrontal cortex and my hippocampus slithering out the hole in my crown and onto the floor. As though I whistled into a shotgun barrel. I want to be thrown off my center and rearranged by something fiery and wet. I want to watch the contents of my head fill a room. As though I sucked a shotgun blow up my nose. :: They call me a depressive. The doctors do. But, I am not that neat. That simple. Yes, while I have been many things, some of them even virtuous – I have always been moody, temperamental and prone to sadness and fear. Even in the most peaceful and beautiful of moments, I have always possessed the talent of being able to find the fear and sadness above anything else, before anyone else. In any moment. Anywhere. But, Pity me not. I have pitied myself enough over the years to have made my misery nearly acceptable. And often, invisible. To the point of comfort. Sometimes, I even feed my obese pity before I lay my head down to nap. The truth is: I am fortunate. Even in my dark nights and sunny, jagged days of pure sadness and terror. And stupid shame. And purple embarrassment. I am fortunate says today’s affirmation: I have seen the entire visible spectrum of color and heard most namable intonations of sound. I have known phonemes that flew from the strongest and most fallible of humans. And yes, I’ve run the entire gamut of emotions – some mostly with violent intent: Great pains, fleeting ardor, swirling intoxication, tempestuous calm; and that perfect space where pure terror meets exalted joy – I have known them all. Empirically, I have soaked-in the most volatile of these emotional cousins, like battery acid through my fingertips. But now, I am of the belief that I may have drank some of that acid too. I can feel it burning down my pipes and tying an upward spiral of heat from my gut to my head. My heart to my mind. My stomach to my throat. But, now having gone down my corduroy road a thousand more miles, I am able to reflect back – to spot the emotional constants in my lopsided, wind torn sensory sails. And while I’ve been blinded by the stormy seas, and often overlooked these constants – they were always there. Simply, they are: fear and sadness. Even when I was exhibiting my whimsical adolescent smile in public, years and years ago – this fear, this sadness was endlessly on parade; scribbled on my forehead like a tattoo marking a sailor’s treacherous, and protracted voyage from the Far East. It was always written on my lips, my eyes, my brows; in every expression I have offered the world. It has been said that my emotional state, as told by my animated face, is easy to read. Ha! How little they know of me. Often, I have demanded: Who prompted this – these ticker-tape pageants of pain and fear? Surely not me. I’ve never been fond of such public displays. And while I have struggled with the ownership of various matters in my life, I have come to one slow conclusion – had only after thousands of days and jagged nights. The conclusion? That I have enabled something else to become responsible for at least some of these melees: They. Them. Those. Women. Or, if you’re uncomfortable with that linguistic mirage as I am – then, girls. Girls have been constant source for my parades: my joys, my pains and some of my greatest disappointments. More importantly, they have always stood as the most perfect, and easiest of analogies. Accordingly, I have always seen girls as mirrors: Reflecting all of my base emotions – right back at me. With every glance into them I always bloom, then: doom. This is the vision I have created: Girls as that nymph named Echo – that stainless mirror which has reflected all the tallest of emotions back at me, as though I were in a cave and everything was verbal. Tonal. Sound. Echoing… As far as I can deduce, it all began in first grade when, behind the bookcase, the first girl kissed me. There, from behind all those skinny children’s books, and unbeknownst to me – my tale and tradition was grown. The mirror, shown. Despite being younger than my days and faces predicted, I remember peeking up and around the room after she kissed me. All alone, and without anybody else to witness my cross – I felt then that I had lived for an immeasurably long and windswept time. I felt then, that I had spent the recurrent ages forever swimming upstream – with the snarl hooked nose of the pink salmon fish; fighting and fighting the current of life and the mighty tug of gravity all at once. At times I have tired of this fight. And when I have felt defeated by the odds of such great forces, I have acceded and floated belly-up in the calm pools of mediocrity. As though I were waiting for my death, I floated in the cool waters of Middle America and its short traditions of rugged individualism and unforeseen limits of excess. And so here it is again: A girl is at the center of my emotional world. And, again, I can barely crawl. My jigsaw puzzle body is falling apart and I can barely breathe. My love is broken. I am having a heart attack. So, here, I ask you too: Is it accurate to call my condition “depression”? Is depression the same as sadness? A tale of sadness, life, love and all the four letter words, A Biography of Fear is the freshman effort from Denver native Jonathan Bitz. Jonathan Bitz's memoir: A Biography of Fear. Jonathan Bitz, Editor: syntax. Jonathan Bitz A Biography of Fear. Jonathan Bitz's memoir: A Biography of Fear. Jonathan Bitz, Editor: syntax. Jonathan Bitz A Biography of Fear. Jonathan Bitz's memoir: A Biography of Fear. Jonathan Bitz, Editor: syntax. Jonathan Bitz A Biography of Fear.