But I didn't think Paul understood fear. Fear, to Paul, was an occasional lapse of cocky-bastard confidence—it was subway grates and selling out. For me, fear was fettering, but it also afforded a strange, almost placid consolation, and a belief that the trauma was too deep to ever have to be faced, which, at times, created a zone of comfort around me, one I obviously didn't have the power or the guts to relinquish.
