My father always told me that I should never draw attention to my fear. Fear was for the defenseless, the feeble minded. In the eyes of my father, the hardened man, the path to manhood lay deep-rooted in the minds and teachings his own father had cruelly assimilated into his own boyish mind.

Never fear anybody but yourself. For it is your own mind, your own thoughts and desires which is the very heart of all fear. If you are to fear, fear yourself, for you and only you, create the fear that taints your heart. My father would give me sermons, drilling in constant taunts, constant trouncing.

My father died ' did I feel remorse? Sure I did, yet the only feeling I truly felt was the one I wasn't meant to feel, fear. It had been long since, that such silence gripped the homestead. I had sat in my father's office, rotating his fine leather chair in a whispering whirlwind of freedom. I watched the world spin until it collapsed in ruin at the feet of an insolent child, not yet a man, gripped by fear which stabbed at the limbs and the mechanical heart which had been transcript since birth.

My father had been a brilliant man, once upon a time. Yet unlike fairy tales, there was never a happy ending. I was used to the daft loneliness of the household after my mother's death in the year of my fourth birthday. My father began to lose patience; quickening to his work, forgetting about his children which he had subsequently abandoned in the grief of his pain.

My brother, who was born two years before myself, was always my father's favourite. You could see it in his eyes, the intricate beauty that was the underlying sense of pride that a man feels for his son which he has raised since birth, chosen or not. My brother was always the man my father wanted me to be, yet in ways, we always knew this to be false ' I could never be my brother. In certain musings, this is what I believe to be the untimely demise and the terror in which I wrought once again on my father's sorrowful soul.

William was never afraid. Just like our father, he had become a failure to his own teachings. This is what separated us, I was willing to give into fear, for isn't it a human emotion which aptly defined who we are as people. To be devoid of this emotion seemed to scar the very outlier of what it was meant to be human. I was always afraid, William, was not.

William was enlisted to fight in the war. My father glowed of pride as he sent his favourite into combat ' for this proved his parenting was a success, and that his little boy had become a man. Or so my father deluded himself with. Two letter would be received every month, one for my father, and one for me.

My father would sit by the crackling fireplace, sipping the finest glass of brandy, the smell of Old Spice lingering on the cool autumn breeze, cruel yet comforting. My father boasted; it's what he did best. The letter would tell of Will's bravery, of his journey, of his tales involving chivalry and mateship, devoid of anything close to the truth, or so, what my letters had stated.

William was always a kind heated man; what a shame that he was also a sheep. He would be shepherded by our father and would follow every command. As if he was unable to ruminate his thoughts, and his own secret desires which lay in the heart of beautiful Delia, the local butcher's youngest daughter.

William's letter spoke as if Fear himself had a poison tongue and a quick pencil hand. The words floated with brilliance which captivated me, for as it would seem, only I had ever seen the real William, and as fate would have it, I would be the only one.

Tabula Rasa. It is what I would have thought following the passing of my brother in the early morns of winter that year of my sixteenth birthday. My brother had been shot through the heart; not by Cupid's arrow but by the philosophy that your friend's come first. A single bullet through the heart, and a young man's life swiftly drew to a close.

In ways, I was orphaned long before my father's death. Many still saw me as a young boy; under my father's eyes I would have been a coward; under others I may have been something more. For myself, I was already a man, I didn't need approval.

That day I returned home from school, my father reading my brother's final letter ' drinking another swig of brandy. I was wet, cold and tortured from the downpour which stormed as much outside as it did within the pit of my stomach. I had calculated this moment for years - - the day I rid the world of my fear.

A single whisper. Blinding fury which traced every last sentiment I had left. My father dropped to the ground, clutching his bleeding chest. Tears in his eyes. The greatest betrayal ' son and father.

I sat, hours upon hours after his death. His blood on my hands, drinking a glass of my father's finest brandy. As if by will and way, the soft spatter of incongruent thoughts, racing around my head. Why won't they stop?

Yet as I spin, in my father's fine leather chair, the world seems a blur ' how was I to know that one day; or this very day, that the world would fall to the confused feet of an insolent child.

For those who read this know, that with all my malevolence; mea culpa! Say the name that I long searched for. I was the son of a brilliant yet misguided man. My brother William too, was an honourable man to who I would be proud to call my brother. Know that this note is my repentance to the world which would so cruelly take me in, yet rid me of all my humanity. My name is of no concern ' I am nobody. I am one face within a sea of many. People are too self involved in their own problems that they forget to feel anything, a morsel of emotion for someone not themselves. I am your best friend; I am your enemy; I am in your history class; I once shared lunch with you. I am your sister and your brother. I am man; I am woman; and within all, I am human.

The cold metal pistol lay on my father's desk. I closed my eyes and heard his taunt for the final time. Taking my last drink, I gave into my fear.

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