the slap of conclusion

When they finally released me, I left with a fear of women. A fear of what they can do and a stronger fear of what they can't.

How, where I was, I came to the conclusion I did is best left to the guesses of people who can more easily thrust themselves into thought than I can.

It's not that I didn't have time to think. I did. I had time; it ran off me. Then there was the rethinking. But there was such a small population of thoughts in me. The only ones I latched to were vile and absurd, rainwater beading on cracked walls in a building on the outskirts of a city at the pinpoint center of a country that's been left to crumple.

And women never took up residence anywhere, not once that whole time.

Life can spring out of unexpected places. Opportunistically in sidewalks, say. Or science scaring it out of a barren womb. Life can shrink and grow, expand and collapse. Disappear if it wants.

What I came to, the slap of conclusion, was between. Not swollen or skinny, here or away. Not even living or the opposite.

Between, somewhere between.

But real. This fear, my fear, is real as the history of your own life. Women. I hide my head from them. Not from shame, not out of reverence. Not because I'm any more like or unlike them than I've ever been. But because it's the only thing there is now.