I stood on the north end of the Howard Beach subway station platform at JFK airport in Brooklyn. The sky was a rich cloudless blue and the air felt moist, like a new Spring, even though May had just turned into June. In the past the trek back into New York used to bring with it either an exhilarating joy or a foreboding sense of dread. Today, however, it elicited only apathy. I had been in New York for over five years now. New York had merely become the place that I lived, a city both unlike any other and at the same time the same as all the rest.
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Fear, like its sometimes counterpart pain, is one of those things that lacks a verbal equivalent. The primary difference between the two is that fear exists only in the mind, whereas pain attacks the body or measured periods of time. Yes, fear can be painful, and pain can be feared, but the two are very different. Most of the time fear is shrouded temporarily by adrenaline- a natural drug generated by the body to combat this particular ailment. It only becomes tangible when introspection is added to the formula. It’s the “after” that gives fear its meaning and its definition.

Fear exists in varying degrees, not unlike pain. Fearing for one’s life is a very different experience than the fear of missing a plane or the fear of eating bad sushi. Language, as I have already indicated, is probably not the best tool for describing the emotions that accompany fear. Unfortunately that’s all we have.

The impetus for this reflection, which I am even now still experiencing-thirty minutes after the fact-is not unique. See, I live in New York city, a place many people fear even without having ever visited. It is not even the daily toil or intense human density of New York that I speak of, but more the conceptual vastness of the place. That fear, however, is also unlike the one I am referring to. Tomorrow I am going to the hospital where a doctor will give me large quantities of morphine and then stick a scope down my throat in an attempt to figure out why it is my stomach is not working properly. Yet even this is not what makes me feel fearful right now.

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