At times I feel this darkness close in around me. Not a bad darkness, but a comfortable kind, similar to when you lock yourself in your room and listen to your favorite band just because you want some solitude. It is a false darkness, the kind in which you want to seem obscure and engrossed in thought when really your blissful ignorance shines through yet again.
I never have thorough control of where my gaze falls, it just kind of happens. There have been a couple of times that I’ve wondered if something larger than myself is controlling what sights I view, though I prefer to not dwell on the idea of this being governing the only thing I have ever been able to do.
Everything is so vivid right before that darkness begins to reel itself closer to the center of my life. Though I always thought I could never see everything all at the same time, I can, in that one wrinkle before the slow moving circle that turns this comely site to black. And then for a second or two it is an all encompassing eclipse that tranquilizes any sign of color.
In that one moment there is nothing of which I am more uncertain. For a second I am terrified that I will never see those yellow pencils, red painted finger nails, or that one look of optimism I saw on that boy’s face when I looked up from the notebook. But then I am hopelessly devoted to the dark. That comfort that I will never have to see a young boy fall off his tricycle, or a horrifically made horror movie, and I will never have to watch the cloudy veil of liquid mask over my body before it dives upon the nearest cream colored canyon.
There are periods upon which that darkness encases me for what seems a life time. I will be fine at first, those beginning hours are somewhat tender. That part of this cloud has heart. In that stage I can still remember the things I’ve been, and what I’ve recognized as normal. But then, those hours turn to days and the blanket still weighs itself on top of me. Though the blanket is there, the coziness has evaporated into the normalcy of numbness, and I can’t feel anymore.
Sometimes I try, really f*ing hard, to push myself to move. I wiggle, and I twitch, and I pace back and forth, and back and forth. But there is no simple strolling through the essence of time where darkness dominates the things I’ve seen. This envelope of smoke will lighten for a while where I almost feel I will see an illuminating glow again, but alas I don’t. So I continue to jerk, and twist and wait, until something will set me free of this constant caliginous life.
Then, similarly to a monarch butterfly fluttering over the night, I can feel the brisk breeze kick off of her wings, and glisten over my body. During this momentary opening I detect only this sensation. Though I want the light that flits and flies above me, to fly for a longer period of time, it kind of frightens me. The tapestry of black warmth slowly removes itself, until I clench myself tight, and pull the blanket back over my heart again so the breeze doesn’t sting. Why can’t this trickling breeze from the light be warm? Instead it has a dry chill that isn’t the same light that I was used to. Bright, but an almost gray, sort of blinding adaptation to the light I remember. I thought I would feel the Monarch’s orange radiating within me but I don’t.
I wish I would have turned back over and hid my fate so the world would never find it. But now here I am, and that silhouette between the two realities of color is blurred. From my newly found vantage point, everything I see should be cloudless and crowned with perfection. There shouldn’t be any hangnails on the delicate fingers that tap a rhythm similar to the emotional pounding of events in my life. There shouldn’t be a red light when I am furiously on my way to go somewhere really f*ing important. There shouldn’t be a cookie too large to fit into the glass when I just want to dunk that s*** in some 2% Golden Guernsey milk, god damn it. I want to at least be able to see the sad things out of sunny scope. I want to at least… do the wrong things right.
Amidst all this, I can see something else coming towards me, another boulder ready to crack my already tainted shield. But it isn’t the right coloring to be a boulder, not gray like all the rest, but cream, or peachy, or a slender mix of the two. Fascinated, I await its blow. Expecting it to be a knock asking if any one was home, to which my answer would be no, I was overwhelmed when it masked me in a cloak that wasn’t dark. Instead, the cream lingered on top of me for a while, moving this opaque shield along my curves. Swirling through the vacuum of beasts, then it clasped itself on to me without the cream, it was just part of me now.
The muddied blur had disappeared and every inch of human haze evaporated out of the void that had consumed me after I came out of my cave. The cloud between myself, and what I understand is nonexistent. This blanket doesn’t hide me, or protect me, but it lets me gleam in the light. Sometimes so much that I reflect the lights of everything beautiful around me. At first I thought that I was empty in the face of this shield but I’m not. This body is not empty. This body is free.