Darkness

Darkness. ‘It’s just a feeling,’ he thought, ‘it’s all in my mind…’ Though

many times he had tried get rid of it, he couldn’t remember a moment of his life

without that empty feeling. He tried to convince himself that he had gotten used to

it, that it didn’t bother him anymore, but every second the emptiness dug deeper

into his soul, slowly transforming him into a hollow shell. He had forgotten pleasure,

pain and love. Many times he had thought of death as an escape, but as he stood

on the fine line that separates life and death, he looked down and saw straight into

the eyes of hell. He cowered and hid deep within his own misery, regretting every

instant that was wasted on his life. But he didn’t have the courage to save those

moments for other people. He was too selfish to realize the pain he was causing to

others. But those others no longer existed from him. His family had become

strangers. He spent whole days locked in his dark bedroom, sitting in the back of a

closet, clutching an old picture, crying for a long lost dream. He was just another

victim, another soul that had gone astray.


His wife had tried to bring him back. She tried to get him to talk to his

friends, to his children, to anyone who was willing to help him. But every time he

heard someone enter through the front door, he would lock himself in his bedroom,

and would crawl into his dark closet. Why this had happened, no one had ever

managed to understand. His wife had called countless psychologists, even

psychiatrists, but he had refused to see all of them. None of them could tell her

how to help him unless they talked to him first. But he never came out of his closet.


Finally one night, as his wife was laying wide awake in bed, he walked

out of the closet. He was standing tall once again, the man his wife once had

known. The portrait he had been holding on to for so long was crushed at the back

of the closet floor. He got in bed beside his wife and put an arm around her

waist. “Please forgive me,” he whispered into her ear. But it was too late. With tears

running down her cheeks, his wife got up from bed. She didn’t even look at him as

she packed her bags, or as she walked out the front door with their children. ‘You

are dead to me,’ she repeated over and over in her mind, ‘you are dead to me!’