The Dark

I fear I am losing my mind. I can sense it leaving me, slowly being pulled into that

impenetrable wall of pure nothingness. Before you judge me mad, as readers often do, allow me time to explain. I am of perfectly sound mind and body, and, from any reasonable perspective, am a functioning human being. And yet...I can feel the thing encroaching on me, gradually stealing all that makes one themselves and pulling me into its void. It will not stop, I know that, and no delusions will be able to truly convince me otherwise. Perhaps I am not making myself clear, so allow me to rephrase; I am not afraid of the dark. I have never been afraid of the dark.

What does the dark have to do with the slipping of my sanity, you may ask? After all, the absence of light is not some horrid creature capable of ruining me. Nevertheless, the dark is not alive, and is therefore nothing that the human mind can truly comprehend. Think to yourself, really think, if you have ever been in true darkness. Not a room enclosed by heavy walls, so black that should one wave their hand in front of their face, they would not be able to see it, nor an expanse of nature enclosed by the gossamer threads of stars and delicate gasses of the night sky. Neither of these are true darkness. True darkness may never form in a space full of life. It is a heavy, stagnant weight upon one's shoulders, so black and sticky that even the depths of the ocean could not compare, and with a pressure that weighs down not solely upon the body, but the mind too. There is no possibility of escape, and if even a shred of radiance attempted to enter, it would most certainly die upon the moment of arrival. In true darkness there are no stars, no sound, and no life. Why do you think that humans all fear it? We fear all that we cannot understand, and death, being incomprehensible, is terrifying. Darkness and death, you must understand, are so intertwined that they are one and the same, giving true darkness a form that humans may not, and do not, want to understand.

The dark is silent. You may think that you know silence, but, again, you would be wrong. Silence and darkness go hand in hand, as terrors often do. When a place is so dark so not to be categorized as a place anymore, silence is there. A deep, shuddering quiet that chills one’s very bones and presses down upon their eardrums, with a roar so loud it might swallow them whole. In darkness, light and sound never penetrate. One may find themselves trying to scream, but the voice dies, for when in silence, it simply cannot live. Nor is any other life present. When found in complete darkness, one simply ceases to exist in the world of the living. It is impossible. After all, seasonal affective disorders are a well known factor of poor mental health. Amplified by a million, one may begin to grasp the true blindness that accompanies the dark.

I do not know when it marked me, but I do not believe that it is a malevolent being either. Perhaps this was my fate ever since I was very young, and the life that I underwent in the meantime was merely a reprieve from the oppressive night that soon stole me. I do remember, however, that when I was a child I did not understand death. Although it is common in small children, as adults believe that they are too frail to understand the finality of our demise, that was not the case. It was not that I feared mortality, on the contrary, death and darkness were regular companions of mine. As a small child I would sneak away into the darkest recesses I could find, the pure lifelessness welcoming me into its shrouded sepulcher. You may think me unwell, perhaps with a fascination for the macabre, but that is simply untrue. It is just that I was drawn to the dark and it, in turn, enveloped me.

Despite my attempts to locate the darkness I sought as a child, I never encountered it until well into my twenties. You see, darkness is not merely an absence of light, but a state one cannot

escape from no matter how hard they try, with its stifling presence stealing one from the waking world and into its cache of death and silence. Just as death is more than an absence of life and silence is more than an absence of sound, true darkness is far greater than any lack of light. Although I sought it in my childhood, I had never quite understood that.

In retrospect, I was very lucky to have survived. Others would have perished, and it was not of my own wits that I did not. Sometimes I wonder to myself whether I was saved, or rather halted from an inevitable end. Whether or not my mind is intact anymore, that is up for debate. It happened on a cool, windy morning, the kind where night and day blend together. Though my memories of time in light are muddled, I have reason to believe that I lived near the sea. I do not recall walking with others, though I am not confident that I could retain that information, seeing as people are such stark opposites to the dark. One way or another, I had ended up by the docks. It was still very early, and the sky was beginning to fade from its inky grandeur into the weak wisps of pink and orange that tickled the horizon. Underneath the worn strips of wood I saw the murky water lapping at unyielding supports, shabby lumber the only blockade between the ocean and me. I had always preferred to walk near the docks, as the early morning water was gloomy and dark, so much so that it was almost tangible.

I remember feeling a pull which, even now, is not entirely clear to me. You must understand that this darkness I reference is not a being. It is not alive, and it is certainly not aware. It is...primordial. A force that is neither supernatural nor of this world. Some, like me, are entranced by it, with a craving that is satiated only when encompassed by this absence of substance. That morning I felt it more strongly than ever before, a sense of longing eating away at my senses. Not simply an itch in the back of my mind but a roar, pulling and pushing like the ebb and flow of the waters lapping beneath my feet. I could feel myself being drawn towards this

thing...and I knew there was no feasible way of preventing myself from entering the water, soon feeling the pressure and the slow, meandering way that light left, leaving me buried with nothing but the cool, perfect dark.

I jumped. There is no other way to say it, and, frankly, I have no use for lies. Darkness does not weave webs with words, it simply is. Police reports claim it was attempted suicide, and I am the only one who knows surely that it was not. I did not mean to end my life, only to feel that pure darkness that I had sought for so long. Thankfully, as the reports say, a local fisherman doing his rounds saw me fling myself into the water and ran to retrieve me, pulling me from the inky depths and phoning an ambulance. I remember none of that. Only that for a moment, one single, solitary moment, I felt true darkness. It is a feeling that I will never forget.

I do not know how much time has passed since the incident, nor do I care. All I know is that the dark has stolen me once and for all. My days blur together in a haze that lifts exclusively in darkness, life no longer holding any meaning to me. I no longer fear that I am losing my mind, for I now know that it was lost long ago. The dark has come for me and, one day, it will come for you too.

Perhaps I am afraid of the dark after all.

"Dead Land" by Jyant for DeviantArt.