What is a Specter?
I turned to Google
(the Twenty-first Century’s
collective electric dictionary)
to see what specter means.
I scrolled through a few
explanatory possibilities
until I found one
that interested me.
Some tinier websites
(not the Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
describe a specter as:
any object of fear.
This definition’s specific
yet equally general phrasing
strangely
intrigues me.
It makes me think:
Really?
Anything
can be a
specter
if I find it
scary?
As a scattered graduate student,
I am mainly afraid
of papers.
Once
assigned,
they slowly begin to quietly float
beside my mind.
While dangling around my thinking,
these papers soon begin to sing
eerily.
Their harmonizing eventually
becomes sirening and screeching,
which only increases in frequency
until I finally reach
the life-bringing
deadline.
As a new husband,
I am mainly afraid
of children.
My future kids,
these amazing,
beautiful,
and new possibilities,
these exciting
hypothetical beings,
parade in my dreams
and simultaneously
loom over my
sleep.
At night, I often find myself
wide awake, thinking:
What kind of
father will I be?
Will I
repeat the failings
of my
ancestry?
Will I keep
the history
of their
victories?
Will my
children
become
my righteous
legacy?
As a young man,
I am mainly afraid of
myself.
Each day,
I think about
this patriarchy
and my position in
inequality.
I ponder my informed
risk and ability
to freely kill and conquer
everyone and everything.
I worry about my
supposedly innate capability
to become more evil than anything.
My dangerous potentiality
hangs over me
daily.
Are all of these things
(papers, babies, and me)
truly
specters?
Well,
I definitely won’t say
with certainty,
but
I know one thing:
they certainly
scare me.
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