It's not pure fear anymore - or more precisely, this time around. It's more like intense discomfort, as all the emotions that usually quietly haunt my unconscious rush to the surface at the same time. It's almost akin to internal panic about Life itself, set off by a precise and limited trigger: sitting in an aeroplane during take off and the steep climb into the sky that follows.

It's as if the metaphor of climbing high to soar above the world is the very image of what pushes my internal "danger - eject seat now" button. The only problem of course being that there is no way for me to eject myself out of my being - while staying alive, that is.

What makes it perhaps even more ridiculous is that the event that seems to be the root of all of this rampant fear is no more on my mind. It's the fear itself of flying that I fear as well as seek. In my irrational mindlessness I seem to have developed a strange faith to my fear: if I am not afraid of dying in a plane crash anymore, perhaps then, and only then, will that fatal crash occur. An obviously vicious circle.

But when fear is worn out out of habit (taking the plane a number of times within a very short time span has a tendency to remind me of how at home I used to feel on planes) it is a bit unsettling to find it replaced with the most excessive internal, emotional and psychological discomfort.

Perhaps as fear is repelled out of its own known territory, the gap left behind is the one into which all the rest of what I fail to deal with in daily Life come rushing in, hoping for a similar resolution.