Darkness

I stood outside in the dark for ten minutes at two in the morning. Here's what came of it:

There‘s a certain silence that follows the dark around like a little brother. It wraps itself around your legs and covers your ears as if to say “Guess who.” It stuffs your ears with cotton balls until all you can hear is the rush of two-a-m-travellers on distant roads, the roar of tired pilots landing their planes on the lighted airstrips.

It’s not true dark out there in the open, though. The night has been polluted by artificial lights. It’s said that nocturnal animals are being killed off by it, that the night is no longer dark enough to hunt so they starve, holing up in trees and caves and waiting for blackness that never comes. Darkness does not pollute. It merely fills the space that the light has left behind in its ravenous hunger, eating the scraps of air it can find.

We fear the dark. We fear the uncertainty of twilit shadows, of monsters in the closet, of shades and reapers. We fear what we do not understand. Do we understand why we fear?

I think the darkness is beautiful. It holds a magical insecurity. It is fleeting, frightened. It is just as afraid of us as we are of it. When the lights come on it flees to the corners and hides under furniture, waiting to come out and dance a rain dance, a dark dance, as shadows around the fire.

Even in blindness we cannot accept darkness for what it is. I spent the better part of one day blindfolded, and my brain still fabricated some semblance of light that floated around my eyelids like an oil spill. Do the blind find some light, then, or do they only know darkness? Can they who have not seen know light?
I hope to someday find true dark, in the bowels of the earth where moth nor spark doth corrupt the stillness. When I find it I will sit on the ground and breathe in the damp air and just be, because in the dark you have nothing else to do but be. The clothes on my back, the flaws of my skin, the blindness in my eye; nothing matters in the dark. Nothing matters but the stillness of my breath, the chill on my skin, the noisy thoughts in my dark head.

What about you? Are you afraid of the dark? Or do you embrace it?