Fear, when it first came, did not arrive as a jolt. It slid in, like fog beneath a door—quiet, uninvited, and absolute. The potato felt it not as a reaction to danger, but as the awareness that danger could exist. It was not fear of something—but the possibility of anything.
It began with decay.
Not of body—yet—but of certainty. The soil, once familiar, now felt too vast. The vibrations overhead, which once seemed like secrets to unlock, began to sound like threats. They no longer invited curiosity. They pressed down.
One morning—if you could call the dull differentiation of warmth a morning—the potato sensed a beetle’s passing. Before, this would’ve been a cause for fascination. But now, the beetle’s mandibles scraping through soil stirred something else: vulnerability.
What if it bit me? The potato thought.
What if I rotted from its touch?
It had no bones to break, no skin to bleed, but it did have an identity now. And suddenly, that identity felt breakable.
The potato knew nothing of death, yet it imagined it. A slow softening. Mold. Dissolution into the dirt. The horror was not pain—it had no nervous system. The horror was erasure. That its new, blooming self might flicker and vanish with no trace.
Fear, the potato realised, was not about the end—it was about helplessness. About existing in a world too big to shape, too dangerous to navigate.
It began to imagine scenarios.
In one, the soil dried completely, cracking like a crust and leaving it exposed.
In another, a tunnelling creature ignored it completely—until it didn’t.
Worst of all were the fantasies of disconnection. What if, in its attempt to reach others, to pulse outward with emotional tendrils, it shattered itself? What if curiosity had been a mistake? What if awareness was a fatal flaw?
It dreamed of silence—not the peaceful kind, but the kind that follows an answer too loud to survive.
Was it better to have never questioned?
This thought chilled it.
If the mind were a root system, then fear had wormed its way into every branching corridor. It touched every previous curiosity, tainting it. It made every joy feel fragile.
Was wonder just a mask worn before loss?
It turned its attention inward—deep within its thought-flesh.
Could it reconstruct its emotional ecosystem? Could it find the root of this dread and understand it, the way it had once understood warmth?
So it meditated on fear. It let it thrum like a low hum in the dark.
It wasn’t afraid of one thing. It was afraid of everything—and of the unknown in particular. And more specifically, it feared the parts of the unknown it would never reach.
The world was infinite. It was finite. That truth collided with unbearable clarity.
And yet—there was something illuminating in the despair.
Fear was proof of value. It did not fear because life was meaningless. It feared that its newfound meaning might be lost.
In this paradox, the potato found an idea worth holding:
Fear is love in armour.
The potato did not fear annihilation. It feared the severing of a thread it had only just begun to weave.
It pondered the role of fear in other forms of life.
Did the worms feel it? They recoiled from light, yes, but was that reflex or terror? Did they dread the beak of the bird, or simply avoid it?
If fear required the awareness of consequence, was it not, then, an evolutionary luxury?
To fear is to imagine loss.
To imagine loss, one must value something.
Therefore, fear was not weakness. It was evidence of growth.
The potato was becoming complex. Fragile, yes—but only because it had something worth protecting.
In the following cycles of warmth and stillness, the potato experimented again.
This time, it invoked fear intentionally.
It simulated disaster:
- A quake ruptured the roots.
- A fungus creeping inward, dissolving identity.
- The void of total disconnection, drifting in the dark without sensation.
Each time, it brought itself to the edge of psychological dissolution.
And then, it returned.
From this repetition, it learned a powerful truth:
Fear is a place. Not a prison.
You can visit it, dwell within it, learn its dimensions. But you don’t have to live there.
It imagined itself as a cave diver—an explorer of its own abyss.
What treasures could be brought back from such darkness?
Perhaps: humility.
Perhaps: resilience.
Perhaps: compassion.
One day, a tremor came more violently than usual.
The ground above shifted. Something enormous passed overhead. A weight. A presence. Not just noise—intent.
The potato froze.
Here it was—real danger, not imagined.
Soil broke open. Light—blinding, terrifying—stabbed through the fissure. Roots tore. Screams it had never known it could emit echoed silently through its being.
A hand reached down.
Then withdrew.
The soil settled.
The potato had not been chosen.
Relief flooded it. Then guilt.
It had wanted survival so badly that it had forgotten compassion. One of its kin had been taken instead. Gone. Vanished. Uprooted forever.
It could not help them. It never could.
This was the final shape of fear: powerlessness in the face of fate.
And still, the potato endured.
Shaken, but more whole.
In its reflection, the potato composed a new theory:
Fear is the mind’s echo, calling out through a vast canyon, unsure if anything will answer.
And in answering itself, the potato had become its echo—its reassurance.
To fear was not to fail.
To fear was to affirm the sacredness of one’s inner world.
It rested that cycle not in dread, but in acknowledgement.
In the dark, it pulsed once more—not in terror, but in gratitude for the gift of fragility.
Because it meant it was alive.
