May 7, 2008 by Faith Gonsalves

What am I most afraid of? The fact that sometimes even honesty isn’t enough, that hope is subject to the frailty of our relationships, and that love is separated by distance.

I allow myself to feel pain and love; to cry and scream. But I can’t help but spend nights wondering whether that is nearly enough, mostly because, on most days it isn’t. However, experience has never determined faith, and faith never experience. They are both alone, separate and different. What I feel isn’t always a product of what I know, and of what I have already felt. My capacity to love you isn’t a product of people before you. It doesn’t all boil down to analysis, the ultimate reduction of our feelings and thoughts. They all amalgamate into this vast nothing-ness where everything is consequential or inconsequential, whichever way you choose to look at it.

But, again, what am I most afraid of? Maybe that my honesty isn’t enough, and that the things I hope for will fall apart and that all the love I have will be separated by distance. I don’t’ think that’s true though. I honestly hope that it isn’t. I believe we test our own limits when we allow ourselves to feel, it’s not growth.

When you listen to a song or a piece of music that you really love, it resonates inside of you and the sounds become familiar, the words and notes come naturally, the rhythm suffocates you and drowns you. It contains truth. Someone’s soul resonates in the sounds, it is these sounds that orchestrate a reaction within you that is entirely your own.

Our relationships are alive in everything that we do, our work, our creativity, whether it’s scrambled eggs or cereal for breakfast, whether we go to bed with the TV still on. It’s not reduction. It isn’t quite so simple to delineate the idea in terms of horizontal lines, that run parallel, or that form a grid. This question is the same as whether it remains consequential or inconsequential. We have countless films and TV programmes, books and stories that look at how we are all connected, through chance accidents or fate, how and why we are connected however, is again consequential or inconsequential.

What is it then about fear that drives us to insanity, to terror in the name of defense, violence in the name of protection? Our ‘basic’ underpinnings are said to become active inspite of ‘progress’. It is this that is said to resonate within the sounds that we hear, the sounds that are now so familiar. My fears may not drive me to insanity, to a point where we will not understand each other and my violence may not harm you, or anyone.

These words are a mere microcosm of the sounds, a note within a note, present but dispensable. Though all the notes within notes make up a whole, they are all dispensable.

When I was younger I asked fewer questions. And even that isn’t true, at least then I believed the answers. Today, however, I believe it is important to create a piece of music, or a piece of some kind, something of your own. The songs of other people have long bored into my soul. Sometimes it becomes important to make that stentorian sound, rather than to be engulfed within it.

What is it that I am really afraid of? It is something fairly common. Something most of us believe in.