Alex

I imagined him there, concealed somewhere among my possessions, no longer a harmless little neighbor beyond the glass, but a creature of unknown whereabouts and therefore of infinite possibility. And with that thought, the old fear returned. Not reluctantly, but with the remarkable ease of something that had never truly departed. I was frightened of him again. How extraordinary, I thought, that I had spent weeks watching this creature live, had witnessed his growth, protected his miserable dwelling, taken pleasure in his survival, and yet required only the uncertainty of his location to undo every tender feeling I had cultivated. He had done nothing to me. Indeed, he might have been dead. And still I feared him. It was then that I began to understand the rather humiliating nature of the peace I had congratulated myself upon. I had believed myself changed because I no longer wished to destroy him. I had mistaken my tolerance for courage, my familiarity for affection, my restraint for the overcoming of fear. But perhaps I had made peace with nothing at all. Perhaps I had merely learned to endure what frightened me when it remained visible, contained, and obedient to the boundaries I had assigned it. I could afford him a home, provided it was not mine. I could wish him well, provided his happiness unfolded at a distance. I could even grow fond of him, so long as I knew precisely where he was. I had loved, if love is not too extravagant a word for so slight an attachment, the certainty of his little corner more than I had ever loved the creature himself. And the moment that certainty was taken from me, all my supposed tenderness was exposed for what it was: a kindness dependent upon the absence of danger. I wondered how often I had done the same in other matters. How many things I had claimed to forgive because they no longer stood before me. How many wounds I had declared healed simply because nothing had touched them for a while. How many fears I had mistaken for memories, only to discover, at the slightest uncertainty, that they were still alive and perfectly capable of governing me. There are terrors, I suppose, that grow less formidable with acquaintance. And there are others that merely learn to sit quietly at the edges of our lives, allowing us the comforting illusion that we have mastered them. We mistake their silence for surrender. We mistake the passing of time for the passing of pain. We become so accustomed to the place where they reside that we cease to call it fear at all. Until one morning the familiar corner is empty, and we discover that what we had taken for peace was only the privilege of knowing where to look. The sun had risen fully by then. My room was bright, the window open, the little corner bare. There was no evidence of danger anywhere. Nothing had happened to me. Nothing, in all likelihood, was going to happen. Yet I could not recover the ease with which I had entered the morning. I stood for some time before the window, regarding the empty place where a small creature had spent several weeks of his brief existence. I thought of that first morning, of how he had hurried away when the glass began to move, believing, perhaps, that something enormous had come to destroy him. And I thought of his last mornings there, when he had learned to remain still. I had been so pleased that he no longer feared me, but how bitterly amusing that, in the end, he should have proved the braver of us. For he had learned to live beside what might have killed him. And I, who had never once been harmed by him, could not bear the thought of his coming any closer.