Afraid of the Dark

Dear anyone who has fought the darkness,

There is this weight in the Dark, which

scientists will never be able to understand, 

and artists will never be able to paint,

and the most advanced telescope will never be able to see.

Maybe,

It is the heaviness of knowing that you are alone,

that everyone who raised you up with their

empty

promises and 

false

smiles were helping only themselves,

just to reach one step higher on their own ladders before the

darkness

consumes them.  And when they drop you,

it feels reversed, as if the Earth fell on you and not the other way around.

Then you realize that they weren’t raising you up, but lowering you,

and the weight you feel is the dirt and soil and bodies of things that once lived,

and you are buried by the weight of hate and prejudice,

six feet under.

Maybe the weight is fear,

a monster pressing on our chest to where

you can’t breathe,

a knife held up to your throat, but

you can’t feel

it, the wailing of someone what you should rather die than lose but

you can’t see

it, but 

you can hear

your heart racing, and 

you can almost taste

a Niagara Falls worth of adrenaline pouring through your veins.

Maybe the weight is anger,

or once was,

before the darkness easily extinguished the bright flames and replaced them with a bone-deep,

never-ending

cold,

too cold for self-pity,

cold enough that any sense of self-awareness was

frozen

a long time ago, and left to sit

over your heart,

right where it is colder than the empty

wasteland

will ever be.

As for me,

to get through the days in which there aren’t enough 

lights

to go around,

I pretend.

I pretend

that the weight is calm,

a warm blanket over my thighs on a cold night,

the comforting weight of something believed to be lost,

the gaze of a billon and a half stars on a cloudless night.

I pretend

that the weight is order,

law,

keeping me grounded,

and points of rationality become bonds to my sanity,

but manacles of restriction and the absence of imagination.

Or perhaps

I pretend that 

the weight is possibility,

and I fill my hands with it,

running it through my fingers, content for the moment, dreading the instant when the

illusion

will finally fall apart, but against rational thought anxiously awaiting the future,

and what might become of me

then.

In these moments that I can pretend,

I am no longer

Afraid of the Dark.

Sincerely,

Someone who has seen the Light