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I was afraid of the dark. From the madness of forgetting what was around me, my hand would shoot towards my bedside lamplight. I'd flood the room with light, try my hardest to memorize the clump of clothes hanging off the chair, half-heartedly convince myself that it would not turn into something hideous with tentacles. I'd turn off the lights once again, scared to peek out from the corner of my eye; with the lights out and only the moonlight's eerie glow, a bundle of T-shirts hanging on the back of my chair looked like a face, with its mouth agape, the corners twitching up in a rictus of mangled teeth and evil glee. I scrambled for the switch. But as the sleepless night wore on, even the lampstand would coil itself into saurian proportions; an ugly thing turned uglier as I had been keeping it up all night with my incessant tugging.
It was at this point that I would throw my head under the covers. Eventually I would fall asleep that way. Paradoxically, there was something comforting about diving into black, to gulp the darkness down on my own terms, to have it inches from my face. It was the murkiness that scared me, the cloak that made things unclear. I preferred immediate darkness opposed to having light only enough to see things as they weren't.
The darkness around that lamplight; the one outside the hospital window. That same pathway that curled around its base. It went nowhere; it just trailed off hazily. There were quiet sobs around me. I felt at peace -- or maybe I was numb. The tears welled up in my eyes as well: Sometimes you cry when other people cry.
And, with a degree of haste, that was that. We went home. People came to console us. They told me how proud they were of me. Because my dad died, which made a lot of sense. Having had literally no say in the matter, essentially, you are proud that I am standing here, numb.
I pull the covers up over my head.
The world crashed; it crumbled into dust on my apartment floor, it was blown into tissues beneath my bed, it became the clutter of my thought. The grey alleyway which the window dismally faced: It never mattered more to me what he would think.
Blackness is cold and deep. It's possible to hide in it, but you have to be swallowed.
Sometimes you need to just say it like it is. No matter how ill it started, how unguided its direction. It all came bubbling up in tears. They dried in the natural grooves of that knitted sweater. And it held them for me: the anguish, the hopelessness, the fear, the longing. There were no real words between us. Just listening. To truly grieve only nine years later was a moment when God never seemed closer.
It's odd that a snaked monster is merely a bedside lamp in the beam of morning. Friends are the opposite, though: You see who they are when it's dark.
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