The Dark

...since I didn't post for a long while, this is a long post.

She rubs her eyes and looks at the walls again. At the moment, they’re looking a sickly, fluorescent sort of color—more lemon yellow than soft green—that makes the pit of her stomach feel even emptier. But it’s not just her stomach. As the hours slip by—midnight, one, two, three, four, five in the morning—she, in her entirety, becomes emptier and emptier, like her mind’s being removed, carved out, gutted out of her body. Turning back to the computer, she tries to conjure up emotion, ideas, thoughts. Something? 

Nothing. There’s just a bunch of space, empty air, where she—her soul, perhaps—is supposed to be. Listlessly, she continues to work. There’s something about the black, silent hours of the late night and the cold, gray hours of the early morning that makes a person move on, trudge on, drag on, regardless of whether she’s more of a carcass than a living, breathing being or not by that time. There’s something about the absolute silence beyond the tinny music coming through her old earphones that keeps her squinting bleakly on, deeper into the glare of the computer screen that’s bleaching her skin dull and dry. She suspects it just might be an addiction to the Dark—addiction to the acidic sense of nausea creeping through her veins, the gritty stiffness of her joints, the restrictive chokehold of her own throat on her shallow breaths. It’s an addiction to being utterly alone, utterly exhausted, utterly dysfunctional, yet utterly herself. While her body sacrifices itself, her mind feasts on the freedom of solitude. While her body breaks apart like a decaying, shucked-off skin, breaks into what feels like a million—billion—quadrillion—bajillion little pieces, her mind perceives the magic happening outside, under the shadows of the pondering moon.  

She can tell when the Dark hits in its entirety. She knows exactly how sour the lemon-walls need to be, how dense and dark the sky outside, how diminished her senses, how empty her stomach, how tired her mind. Nearing the breaking point, she holds in sickness by turning away from the computer and slouching over her desk as she buries her face in clammy, crossed arms and closes throbbing, bloodshot eyes.

The instant she’s about to give up again, the moment her forehead rests against her trembling hands, she’s slammed back into full function while the world suspends itself outside of motion. The Dark always arrives in the nick of time.

Mind racing, she stands, and listens for the silent confirmation that she is alone. Scrambling, she pulls open the door at the back of her house, and jumps off the balcony. 

As she falls, again she’s swooped into the sense that she holds the world, the galaxy, the universe to her whim. I’m the only one awake in the whole wide world. In these moments there is only her, the curious moon, and the sleeping Earth. Fiercely chill, exhilarating. Pale blue hues permeate everything; the moon is reflected off her hair, her eyes, cars outside, windows, everywhere. It drifts, peering down at the frozen world below.

In these moments, she’s supernatural, extraterrestrial, powerful, invincible. She celebrates the Dark once she lands atop the street light that she’s everyday from her room window.  Normally, though the light is straight across from the window, it is too far to reach, even when she stretches her arm out and hangs halfway out of her window. Not tonight. 

She jumps from streetlight to streetlight, from block to block. She skips on the clouds on her way to the moon, runs across black rainbows, and reorganizes rain droplets into crystalline patterns in the sky. Her homework lies forgotten, back in her room. The cursor on her computer screen no longer mocks; it’s lonely, and blinks timidly at no one, because she has already travelled a long way away, to a place more distant than Far Far Away, or Neverland, or Fairyworld. Where she goes every Dark, the world is ever-changing. Some Darks it’s a nightmare being chased by zombies, other times it’s a kingdom of Happily-Ever-After. Some Darks, she rides dragons high up in a sky with seven moons embedded in it, other times she walks alone underwater, on the sandy seafloor. Whatever it is and However it is, when she is there, she is never dissatisfied with how she lives.

She wakes up the next morning with her keyboard imprinted onto her forehead. Leaning back in her chair, she yawns and wonders what she’s still doing here. She slowly wonders if aliens abducted her and put her in her chair by accident instead of back in her bed. As she stretches, something catches her eye—her spiteful cursor, blinking at her impishly, asking, Where have you been? You are late. In her alarm, she becomes vulnerable, and gravity almost succeeds in pulling her out of her chair. She catches herself and begins typing furiously, hand knocking her mouse off the desk. All thoughts of the Dark are brushed away from her mind, to be restored in another twenty-four hours’ time.