Darkness I Knew #

30 March 2025 #

First draft written in a weekly group. Currently sending out to magazines

I never knew darkness before I found my home. Not really. Growing up, I covered the windows of my bedroom with blankets and boards to block out the overwhelming desert sun and the nagging streetlamp. Looking up to the sky yielded only splotches of hazy gray ink, dripped in spoiled milk.

I was lost. Lost in the cityscapes of the west, mountains of debt, and labyrinthine rental agreements. I was so lost; and one day I woke to find out I had lost everything. I had no address, no maps, and yet the reaper knew where I lived, and took his due.

With everything shrouded in dark, I stumbled without direction. My life, my future, my identity—all amorphous blobs lost in the churning cauldron tended to by whatever being watches me sleep. I never knew darkness, and yet I was shrouded in it, consumed by it.

I left to find a new home, not so hazy, not so hot. On that long, historic road stretching from east and west, I stopped in the middle, and I cried all night. This is my life now, I told myself. Best get used to it, kid. The kind of thing a stern father might say, if only I had one worth listening to.

It was a long road, riddled with twists and turns, steep climbs and sickening drops. Northern Texas is flat, and you can’t see the lines on the blood red roads of New Mexico. I drove five days to find my home, to finally shed that thick layer of slime covering my body, smothering my heart.

Fields turned to mountains and trees, and I found myself in a strange place I had visited once but hardly remembered. I pulled down into the driveway, not up, swallowed by trees and warped by inclines. I took a deep breath without someone’s fist grasping my lungs for the first time.

At first, I thought of that drive as a metamorphosis, leaping from self to self. Really it was more of a trial, and a lot more error. The first night I arrived, I looked up into the sky, my vision framed by looming trees, reaching out to touch me—even though I asked them nicely to keep their distance.

It took a long time to realize the trees sought only to connect, not to cause harm. It took a long time to wear my new skin, find that elusive person I wanted to be—I was not sure I wanted to be anything any longer; until I misstepped in a dried-up lakebed, my whole leg sinking into the earth, and I prayed to anyone who might listen to please let me live.

I felt the trees gathering around me, the wind whispering affirmations. Slowly I calmed my hurried breath and my palpitating, troubled heart—and slowly I pulled my leg free. Filthy, soaked and freezing in the crisp January sun, shielded by a canopy of deciduous sentinels, I had never felt more alive.

That night I lay in the grass, enveloped by the perfect, uninterrupted darkness of the woods. I knew I had finally found my home. I had been properly introduced to the dark.