I Am Darkness

by - 1:45 PM


I Am Darkness
Where were you last night? In bed, no doubt, or somewhere similar. Perhaps couch, chair, mat or earth cradled your weary head in dreamy, gentle hand. Brushed by breezes of slumber melodious, your eyelids drooped, wavered, and at last closed. But did you sleep? Ah, that is the question.
How do you know you slept? How do you know you did not sleep? Could you have slept and dreamed that you woke? Or laid awake and felt like it must have been a dream? Perhaps. The question is – did you sleep alone?
Lonely is the pillow unshared with another. Lonely is the couch that embraces but one. Lonely and heavy is the sleep of the single, for alone must they bear the weight of the night. Did you know that darkness is heavy? If you sleep alone, I think you do. If not – you once knew, even if you cannot remember now.
Did you know it takes strength to sleep alone? To wake from dreams however wonderful or terrible and find no one there to say “You’re awake now.” No one to solidify the burden of the darkness with gentle hand, voice or breath. Loneliness. This is what the darkness is made of. This is what bears you down into either dreams that feel like waking, or presses you beneath a waking which feels like a dream.
Now, loneliness is, in itself, not a bad thing. For the longest time I loved the lonely dark better for its sense of utter emptiness. The shades of night were to me like a balm for restless thoughts which soothed my mind into peaceful dreams. I was content in the lonely dark, until the accident happened.
Flashes of red, blue and white light and a sensation of utter numbness are all that I can remember. They say I almost died. They say I will never walk again. They say . . . they say many things, but I don’t listen as much as I used to. They’re not really there, the darkness has swallowed them whole. You see, that’s the one thing they say that I always hear. They say I am blind.
What to do with this perpetual darkness? Yes, I loved the night! But night without day is not beautiful – it is cold, empty and like a knife in the mind and heart that will never be removed.
At least, that’s what I thought. In the darkness, I thought many things. A few of them were hopeful, but most of them were sad. Darkness dominated my thinking until I found each breath harder to draw than the last. Each movement of the heart harder to contain. I longed to burst forth from this darkness and into a waking dawn. Then I had to remind myself – I will never see again.
It is strange how you never long for something so strongly as when you lose it. I remembered, through my darkness, the light of a fire. That tiny spark which started a flame to warm and light the shadows. Light gives shadows being. Without it, they are nothing. I used to like lighting fires. Striking that match and watching the spark lace its tendrils through wisps of old paper and dry grass. From spark it grew to taper and from taper to a flame. Then the flames would dance with the shadows, weaving and twirling them like breaths of twilight and dawning. People say that the moon and the sun dance. I don’t think so. I think the moon dances with the night and sun dances with the dawn. I liked the moon best, until I couldn’t see. And, now I can’t see, I can’t like either anymore.
Perpetual darkness has a way of cloaking sounds and echoing voices. I know my hearing was not marred – in fact, it has grown stronger. But since I stopped listening, everything has just faded into a numb background. Either the voices are too loud, or they’re so soft, I cannot hear them. At first the realization scared me – that I might be darkening my last link to the light by refusing to nourish it? But with that first fright the sounds returned. They were so hard and rough – like sandpaper filing through the brain – that I had to go back. I had to return to the darkness.
I remember this song I once heard. The beginning of it went something like this: “Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk to you again.” I loved that song, if only for the first two sentences. It used to make me think of slipping into dark corners to tell stories, or sitting beside a campfire and watching as the ashes grew duller and duller until all the light vanished. Then I would talk to the darkness. Now? Well, now I don’t even talk. Darkness isn’t an old friend anymore – it’s me. I am darkness.
Forever.
And no matter what I do, I will always fall asleep in the loneliness of myself. Why does it have to be this way? I don’t know. I find it hard to even care anymore. This is darkness – the friend in me. Hello, darkness. Why am I talking to you again? Because you are my only friend.
My last friend.
The lonely me.
Where was I last night? In bed, I think.
In the dark – alone.



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  1. Oh my gosh! This is heartbreakingly beautiful, and I absolutely adore how you build this character, revealing details bit by bit...AHHH I love this story. <3 <3

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