Dark Refuge

Lights dance before my eyes, lineless shapes of color that tantalize. In such bleak darkness, they are glaring, when once they would have been welcomed. But I am accustomed to my darkness now. Indeed, I savor it. There is a comfort in seeing nothing, in knowing nothing. No longer does my mind churn ceaselessly, for there is nothing to remind it to think. My dark refuge, my retreat against the shifting shapes of uncertain days. If ignorance is bliss, than I am willingly wrapped in it and reluctant to emerge.

Oh, but the colors! Faceless fey that appeal to my love of beauty and sing of wonders I have never dreamed. I have dreamed much, but not of late; those too have gone the way of my starless haven. I remember beauty. It seems a very long ways off and I try to recall how to feel sorrow. The lights glow and multiply until the inky blackness retreats and unveils a place of water, grass, and towering trees that seem to guard a secret spot. But I see the truth and plead for a different sight, for I have no wish to gaze upon the gilded glade, full not of natural splendor but false beauty decayed. Colorless flowers turn their faces to a paling sun and broken leaves float down a browned, grumbling stream. No wonderful place is this. Why, I cry to my mysterious companions, why tempt me with tales of delight, only to reveal hidden horror?

They mock me, my lights, whispering in my mind because such as this is all you will see. My protests do nothing except that I am returned to darkness, a mercy I unknowingly asked for. Not so friendly now, these lights of mine, which first I loved but now despise. They reveal truths I long ago turned from, unable to allow the altering of my perception. But truth is truth; it lies in wait until such a time as I will face it.

My lights become my thoughts, remembrances of pains past and pains present. As I see the brokenness of my current mind, I dismiss without cringe. I have mourned over it so much that I no longer can. The lingering of the past, for all my efforts to banish it far into my haven, pierces my skin as tiny needles, setting my skin afire and denying me rest. I wish to scream, to cry, anything to relieve the torture within me, but inside they stay. Have I forgotten how? Even if I could, the darkness would swallow all and make them as nothing. For there is no one to hear them but myself and I no longer hear.

A door opens far in distance, light spilling into my little world and I turn my face away. I know this door; it has appeared before. It is life and hope, and it is waiting. It is so far away and I can not, will not, approach. Perhaps at a different time I will draw near, when the brightness won’t sear to my soul.

Until then, I float in my waterless sea, heavy and seeped in the darkness of my own doing, until light and pain do not mean the same thing. I am unwilling and do not want the tears it will bring, but know it is inevitable. In the end I will remember light, I will remember sorrow, I will remember joy. But not yet; the distance is still too long, my legs too weak, and there is too much standing between that I must leave behind.