Fear, My Friend

Author: Mira Lee Patel

This is a book about fear. It is a book about longing and loneliness and the way we hide from the world. It tells us how we hide from ourselves, resisting introspection because of our fear of what we might find. This is a book about improbable friendships, and how they forge the truest relationships you will ever have the opportunity to build: the relationship that reaches your heart with your body and mind. You will spend your entire life nurturing that relationship, as there is no better way to spend your time. This is a book about you, and it is also about me. This book is a window that allows us to see each other. This book lived in my heart for years before I found the courage to write it. This book lived in my mind and haunted my being for years during my upbringing, this book that came to stay in a spacious room somewhere in Northern Illinois, and I would read it aloud in my ground-floor apartment in Williamsburg without anyone hearing me. I wrote this book on the warm coasts of Miami, and drew its pictures in a small, beautiful studio in East Nashville, Tennessee, and designed its pages in a sixteen-bedroom Victorian building in Berkeley, California. It is a book born after a year of complete solitude and sorrow in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. This is a book that asks you to look in the mirror without hesitation. You won't always like what you see, but that's okay, look anyway. This book wants you to hold it in your hands, for its pages are filled with honesty and some comfort – I hope. My greatest wish is that you find its pages useful.