Pay Attention

By Lex Krowley

Desensitization.
Have you heard that word?
Here’s the short translation:
The mollification of trepidation, confrontation, and greater sensation into a pitiful compilation
Of…nonsense.
The passive portrayal—no, betrayal—of our senses.

So pay attention!
This is an intervention about the convention of downplaying perception when it comes to tension, how we squirm at the mention of what?
        Nothing?
        Precisely.
We have to give up the way we sagely nod at the woes of yesterday:
    Heartbreak?
        I get it.
    Death?
        I feel your pain.

But do you?

Did you actually take that moment to hear the fear and the tears as the gears of darkness to turn to fire that burns?
When was the last time you took a long moment to think about the fear of dying, of lying there in the unknown, trying to imagine
        What comes next?
When was the last time you thought long and hard about what it would be like to lose and live without your neighbor, your friend, your confidant, your mother, your father, your sister, your…dog?
We bind our minds to bide our time because we worry about what we’ll find
If we let ourselves 
Go
      Down
             There.
Unimaginable
Indescribable
Indefinable
Because we CAN’T. THINK OF IT. NOW!
Not until the demons of the deepening dark whisper dread in the moments before dreaming until dawn of the next day damns them back to hell.

But we shouldn’t forget.

So pay attention!
Because here’s the real danger of our obsession with repression of comprehension—
    We not only forget how to fear;
    We forget how to believe.
We’ve heard the morals and the benefits and laurels of why to be moral, to be brave, to save despair for some other day.
You’ve heard the messages made by minds molded to words in the story books between the pages you turned
    As a child.
But those embers of wisdom fall on unlistening, not deaf, ears that hear only what they expect to hear and give no deeper thought.
If I were to regale you of the tale of how Pandora opened the box and let loose a gale of malice that could have derailed 
    Everything
    But didn’t because she also released
    Hope?
Would you hear it?
Or would you feel it?
Because it’s hard to hear how believing in something, anything, can save you,
But it’s easy to feel it.

Provided you wake up long enough to tear aside the concealment 
So PAY ATTENTION!
Experience the terror of drowning with no
    Salvation!
Shiver in the ecstasy of
    Realization!
Remember what give value to 
Inhalation and Exhalation.
You are alive,
And to ignore it is a violation of everything that could be right
In a wrong world.

And I’ll admit: it’s exhausting.

It can catch your breath the way a sharp fall can snatch your heart out of your throat.

And I’ll admit: it’s painful.
Because the shadows will take openness as a chance to take you.

But the hero that slew no dragons
            Was never a hero at all.

So pay attention.

Where have you been?

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