Chapter Two: Fear & Gripping Grendel. (In part.)

-“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.” Lewis opens A Grief Observed with this sentiment, if one finds them self reading A Grief Observed, meaning, if one seeks out the book because of a need for it, chances are this line will fillet them. I too found grief akin to fear, but I would go further than Lewis. I would say that the primary manifestation of grief is fear. I was afraid.
-It was three months before I wrote anything. My time was consumed with reading, crying, thinking, replaying, justifying, rationalizing and a plethora of other half wasteful, half insightful oddities. Sleep generally came early; I begged its arrival and would settle into uneasy dreams who seemed to have lost the ability to create new material. The mornings providing work and the bittersweet distractions that earning a paycheck creates. It was acidic to be at work, but basic to be busy, it was sweet to get home but bitter to be alone, it was an ugly state of being, all the while I willfully elected to fuel the demise, for a time. After all, there was a lot of neat stuff to see doubled over with my head buried in the ground.
-Sam and Simon were best of friends. Being small boys, their world was both large and small at the same moment. It was large in the sense that they both understood that beyond the smoke covered mountains there were many, many miles, kilometers, fathoms, or whatever one fancies for measuring given sections of land-mass to be discovered. Conversely, their world was small because they made it such. The concept of how small they were was not lost on either of them, particularly Sam, or Samuel. Taking a wild world and cramming it into one’s pocket is not an easy task as one can well imagine. It must be done one day at a time, one spoonful of dirt by one spoonful of dirt. And, Sam and Simon did in point of fact dig in the dirt with spoons. There was a clay ditch across the street where the two of them spent a good deal of time developing a dense maze of traffic tunnels in the sticky, red wall. It looked much like a giant ant farm to the causal viewer, a shot of red surface with spaghetti thrown at it, sinking into the surface just far enough for a matchbox truck to amble along the edge of the precipitous ledge. It was a beautiful, miniature version of the Stremnaya Road in Bolivia, “The Highway of Death.” Though they were not self-aware enough, neither of them, to realize what they were doing, they did go out and make war on the wide World everyday. Determined to make it palatable, manageable; controllable.
-At this juncture a parallel story requires telling. Sam and Simon were raised in a community where status was based on BMX racing. More specifically, status was based on winning BMX races. Armed with a continually growing resolution to win they set about expanding the control of their destinies by practicing religiously. Simon was older, bigger, faster, and he was in a different age group, which was lucky for Samuel. That did not dissuade Simon from poking fun at Sam regarding his choice of starting location on the ‘Hill.’ The real racers all started from the crest of the Hill at the ‘starting gate,’ where from one would gather the most speed, and frankly it is illegal to start from any place else. There was one caveat to said starting Hill, at the bottom of that seemingly immense Hill, was a seemingly massive jump. Gravity is not pocket-sized.
-Upon sufficient berating, Sam pushed his bike from the preferred, middle of the Hill starting point, to the top of the Hill. It is a historical fact; sweaty palms were born on this day. He narrowed his eyes down the Hill, Simon’s prodding, “Eyes on the prize, Newbie!” ringing in his ears. He had borrowed Simon’s helmet for the occasion and it gave him some false sense of courage in his quest to slay the Hill. There were grand visions of racing down the precipice, flying off the jump, and turning his head as he soared through the air in slow motion locking eyes with Simon as he mouthed, “What’s up now?” He imagined the voice of the announcer calling out the starting position verbiage; his small heart beat loudly in his little world. There was a moment when the announcer in Samuel’s mind summoned him and the other 6 invisible racers, “go!” Hurtling down the Hill was pure ecstasy. The speed, the whirling, the rush of certain victory at hand resounded emphatically; his World was indeed small enough to fit into his pocket.
-Somewhere between the split second realization of how large the bottom of the Hill jump was and a rough calculation of speed to weight ration Sam’s briefly pocket sized World began to grow, rapidly. He nearly had had it all the way into his pocket…but inflation was as inevitable as his trajectory. There was a moment, Simon could attest, Sam left his bike, he was traveling though the air, but not majestically. The travel was that of a baby bird on its maiden voyage hitting every branch on the way down; that is precisely what he did.
-Three hours and ten stitches in his chin later, he found himself jumping rope after a dinner at Simon’s parents’ house. “Man, I can feel this weight tugging my chin down every time I hop, it is so weird. It is as if the world is trying to drag me down into itself, it’s heavy…” he thought quietly.