In The Dark

In the dark there is a warm body wrapped in tangled sheets and a down comforter leaking feathers.  It is the instantaneous comfort of your favorite person's embrace.  It is the light sound of their snore and the heat of their breath on your brow as you snuggle close to them.  It is the dark of pure sense, heavenly touch, euphoric feel.  But it cannot be planned, it cannot be scheduled.  It exists in the snooze of the alarm, the late morning delay, the weekend withdrawal.  It is the most desired dark place. 

In the dark there is possibility.  Fantasy, perhaps.  Paranoia.  Too many horror movies.  But there was a sound, no imaging that.  And there are no flashlights, no cell phones, no matches.  In the dark there is fumbling and whispering and desperately beating hearts as blind hands grasp and hesitate and desperately seek the light.  It is the dark that is vanquished so quickly it leaves one laughing in the easy reality afterwards.
   
In the dark there is the unknown.  The great glacier of Freud's vehicle.  The unspoken words, the fuzzy rememberings, the facts that prove inaccurate when pursued.  It is the thread you pull that unravels a broken story and leaves the mind fragmented and frightened as witness to it's own fragility.  It is the darkness of madness to those who wander too far in.

In the dark there is earth.  The moist, black soil.  The endlessly tangled roots.  The burrowing rodents.  The insects and invertebrates.  The stones and sand and minerals.  There are many stories about what else lurks in the darkness.  Some say the mother herself, incarnate as the wise crone.  Others say it is a pathway to other worlds, other realities.  Still others argue that it is just layers upon layers upon layers- endless in complexity and composition.  It is the dark of the ground.  Heavy, shifting, settling and getting ever darker.

In the dark there is evil.  Pure, unadulterated and unrelenting.  Some describe it as the devil or demons.  Some give the monsters other names, other origins.  But all are that which is not good.  That which is not godly.  That which is not pure.  It is the dark of nightmares- the ones that steal your breath before you can scream and crush your chest with an iron fist.  It is the dark of unspeakable facts and occurrences.  It is the dark of mankind's soul; and its stories are found in every culture, every language, among every peoples and tribes.

In the dark there is cold.  Biting, unforgiving and deadly if uninterrupted.  It is endless, it is harsh and it is the way it has always been.  It's why people light candles and drink hot brews in winter.  It's the stuff the stories used to frighten children are made of.  It contains nothing and all things, all at the same time.  But, some would argue, these are overly sentimental observations.  In the end it is just the dark.  And the dark has no use for sentiment.