The Unbearable Weight of Nothing

I thought I had many years to

prepare for your major questions:

Where do babies come from?

What is the meaning of life?

Dad, may I use the car tonight?

But at four years old you asked this:

Are adults scared of anything?

And I had no answer.

At the middle school talent show, the

young girl stood on stage,

quiet and shyly poised. When the
emcee announced her song, we gasped.

“If I Die Young,” she said, by

The Band Perry, the

poignant ache of lyrics we all knew

sung by a girl too young to appreciate

our fears. We applauded loudly when

she finished, raised up by her a cappella

rendition, relieved to think, finally,

it was only a song.

Are adults scared of anything?

The house stood empty as the

day we first moved in, sunlight

pouring through bare windows, the

scattered dust of boxes and memories

tangible as our shared fear. With nothing but

our possessions in hand, the future was

exposed as truly unknowable as it is;

our greatest vulnerability revealed as the

chance merely to influence probabilities,

weak at that. Stripped down,

bare as the empty house,

this is all we are, we thought,

and it was an unexpected relief.

Adults are scared of almost anything, I thought.

Our childhood fears evolve from imagined

beasts and abandonment anxieties

to the usual cast of unbearable realities.

At first fear is imagined, then

learned; the deaths of loved ones,

sordid acts of violence, ultimately

reducible to simply loss, plain loss.

Buddha intoned that life is suffering,

that we might overcome such pain by

enlightened detachment, but for all his

later incarnations we remain

simple peasants of peculiar glory.

Are adults scared of anything?

Yes, string bean, we are.

But we endure because of love.

c. 2012, by Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

part of my new collection, “Unlanguage”