FEAR

Hi! I am Mack.

I need to tell you something. Something that I should have told everyone long before.

Back in my school days, I was a victim of bullying. Victim, that’s a strange word to be used here. It makes it look like it was my fault that I was bullied….

They used to taunt me about my weight, height, posture, bag pack, water bottle, even my goddamn boots. I used to listen to their taunts. Silently. Not responding. Not because I couldn’t, but because I didn’t know how to.

They used to come in groups. I was their favourite. Be it during classes, or breaks, they loved to watch me take in the insults.

One day, someone decided that taunting wasn’t enough. Good old Mack. He could definitely take more than just that, couldn’t he?

So, they began beating me. I didn’t reciprocate this time either. I took in the beatings. I listened to their insults. I didn’t have many friends, those that I had, ran away when I faced the bullies.

My silence infuriated them. It infuriated me too. Every time they insulted me, locked me up, threw juice on me, smashed my project, some part of me got destroyed. Annihilated. Kaput.

And then came a day when I lost all my emotions. I gave up on the very thing they call humanity.

Humanity is a farce. On many levels, it defies logic. Salary levels define your stature in the society. Your so called booming confidence and oozing social skills make you famous. We live on a piece of rock, present on a distant arm of a vast galaxy, in a universe so big that even light hasn’t reached its boundary yet. 13.8 billion years, that’s the age of the universe. And most of our lives are spent in earning money and fighting for a spotlight in the society and feeling good.

When you come to the ground level, we are all just made up of elements. Complex organic molecules bonded together by some vital elements to form a walking, talking ‘living’ being. We fear because we are vulnerable. You scratch yourself, it hurts. Take away the pain, take away our mortality, and then what remains will be the actual truth of humans. We live in a society and follow the norms, listen to the government because we are scared. We are beings that live on hope, feed on it. Fear is the ultimate force, the ultimate power, and when unleashed on a massive scale, it can result in something so destructive, that it may lead to our extinction.

Fear.

I made up my mind that day. I was not going to live in fear anymore.

It was a dark evening. I was sitting on a bench in the park, reading a book.

They came to me. Group of three. Laughing and jeering all the way. The look in their eyes, the look of glee, that look of superficial hatred for something that couldn’t fit into the society.One of them had a baseball bat.

They came to me. Started teasing me. But this time I looked in their eyes, something I hadn’t done before.

Something shifted on their faces, for a second, I could see the fear. But they were back to normal. They took my book and tore it. To pieces. Then they showered the pieces on me.

What came next would have been called barbaric by our society, inhuman deed done by a human.

I took the baseball bat from them. Hit each one of them on the head. Dull thuds, which would have sounded great in an opera, resounded in that deadly silence of the park.

They fell to the ground wailing, crying.

FEARFUL of what was going to happen next.

The bat struck hard this time. Much harder. They cried out louder. Shouted for help. Said they were sorry. Called me a maniac.

And by twenty strokes that could strike twenty home runs, they were all dead, lying in a pool of mixed blood.

I ran from the park. Back to my home. Cleaned myself. Cleaned the bat and hid it under my bed. The next day, it went in the garbage bin. They found the bodies. It was in the papers and all.

I didn’t feel anything. Anything at all. But I do remember the look on their faces. Fear. Fear of death.

Fear is a great motivator. I like that quote.