embarrass

\im-BAIR-us\

verb

1 : to confuse or disconcert

2 : to involve in financial difficulties

3 : to cause to experience self-conscious distress

4 : to hinder or impede

I find EMBARRASSMENT difficult to access in my old(er) age. It's an emotion tacked onto the revealing of things hidden. The only things I keep hidden are those still hidden to myself—I'm not sure who would be able to see me in my actual nakedness when I have yet to really see it. I expose myself so much in my writing that I've lost much shame. In many ways this is a good thing. The writing leaves me feeling as though I have nothing to lose and that I have controlled every act of unrobing.

But I know there is more. There are paths I will not walk down; I stand at their inchoate beginnings, looking into the tunnels of darkness, plagued with an excitement only trumped by a fear whose parameters I cannot explain. In order to traverse this darkness I would have to lose myself and erase my own footprints, never again to be found. I don't know if this is the ultimate freedom or the ultimate trap or if those two endings are actually the same.

I just know I have been hovering at the precipice.