Fear
Fear. Fear of the past. Fear of the future. Fear for yourself. Fear for your family. Fear for the people you share the language with. Fear of the people you shared language once. Fear of scaring them away. Fear of being misunderstood. Fear of the pagan past. Fear of the religionless future – of not having a savior to believe in. Fear of realizing your own power in saving yourself. Fear of realizing your smallness. Fear of realizing your greatness. Fear that makes you numb. Fear that makes you speak every day, every minute in between the only reality. Fear of not fearing again, interfering in the deeds of faith – the destiny written on your forehead. Fear of the foreign. Fear of the native – the intuitive and acceptive. Fear for your family, for them becoming those families – scattered around the roundness of the world, where all paths cross at some point. Fear for the souls of the fallen. Fear for the memory of the ones who will fall. Fear of talking and not talking at all.
– Daddy, why do people fear something?
– Son, we fear only that we don’t know.
– And what is it we don’t know?
– We know nothing, son.
Norayr Manvelyan (b. 2000, Yerevan, Armenia) is a short-story writer in Armenian. His speakers are always self-critical as they are narrating the curious stories and the peculiar characters. Manvelyan’s inspirations are the people he has met on his life path and the experiences he shared with or the stories of which he has witnessed and heard about. Sincerity and music are cornerstones of the author’s prose work and especially poetry work. As an ultimate way of self-expression and introspection, Manvelyan gets exposed, almost naked against the whiteness of the paper, and dives into the depths of paper-ocean. “Writing is a perfectly rational process unless your pen is in your hand, then the pen takes you on a journey, and leads your hand in the unknown ways.” The poet believes in Love, the driving, creative and universal language that all the people have intrinsic knowledge of and can speak against all odds, Indifference, War and Hatred, and Beauty, the trace of Love in the physical and metaphysical reality we are living in.
With Love and Beauty.
