Stupidity?

"You know what my morbid fear is," she asked, quite out of the blue.

Sure, I was taken aback but I kept an inscrutable face as best as I could.

"Waking up one morning and realising that I am not as smart as I was when I went to bed. What if I became stupid? Could I live with it?"

I didn't know how to react to it. What should I say? What could I? I was burthened with a deep dark part of her self and I was honoured to be privy to it. But, why me? I was silent lest my feeble attempt at a response would, in her eyes, make me undeserved of this revelation.

"Is that a paradox?," I said, after a moment that stretched the length of my arm when my arm was the length of the street. "I mean, if you woke up one morning stupid, would you even care to be intelligent? Do you see what I am trying to say? The fear of the stupid is only for the intelligent. When you are stupid, you are content in your stupidity. Or put another way, wouldn't you be so stupid that you don't realise what it is to be intelligent, much less that you went to bed as one?"

"Ok! You win the prize for saying the most number of 'stupids' in one breath," she said. The moment had passed with the suddenness of a blown candle.

That was incredibly stupid of me.