My therapist sighs, swallows the weight of the moment,
then clears his throat to ask, “Tony, what do you believe is the fate of
mortality?” Careful not to own an opinion, a proof that might
later be held against me, evidence submitted to discredit my possible
petition in the highest and holiest of courts, a breach in contract
that could be summoned by heaven’s writ, I fall mute to the white noise
of my continual dismay, mystery that dogs me from session
to session, crux of my dilemma T.J. has repeated for more than a year,
what he claims is at the root of all my anxiety: stupefying fear of
the unknown, unimaginable void of non-existence, a consternation that
can be traced back to the ancients, a people who catalogued
the inexplicable with charcoal drawings, our earliest forms of sophistry
that linked truth to the moon and stars, aid that allowed them
to sleep through the night lest a saber-tooth or woolly mammoth roused
Paleolithic concern when the coarse, animal silhouettes emerged in
the cave’s mouth and children roughed images of terror and bloodshed
on the stone walls as they shied from the treacherous moonlight.