Really Dark. Really? Dark?

“It’s dark.” She spoke as if hoping something else had been written on the page. “Why do you keep writing these dark pieces? I know you love this, but you can do so much more.” Her sage green eyes pierced him.

It’s what I felt, was his weak reply. I couldn’t explain my reasons. Ask me about why the sky is blue or why God has whims depending upon His mood---or explain why UFO’s were totally plausible / implausible, but I can’t explain the melancholy that drives me to write want to about the darker sides of humanity.

“I know you’re capable of so much. I remember your IM’s, they were sweet, romantic, even poetic. You bared your heart, your soul---that’s how you won my heart, my soul.” I could smell the woodiness of her TAO cologne, the fragrance I bought her when we first moved in together.

She was right, of course. In the dark of the night I traded IM’s with her. The words we exchanged were verbal ambrosia. Later, I read them in a different light. It wasn’t that the words weren’t beautiful, or that I had lost any feeling for her; it was quite the opposite. The words written with a longing heart are no longer sufficient to convey what lived, what thrived in my heart.

“I keep waiting for that man to reemerge.” Her words filled me with shame. “You are a great writer. I want people to read what I’ve read, I’d like you to be recognized…” Her voice trailed off, “Maybe you’re trying to write what’s popular, what other people want?”

I was, am, a fair writer. She believes me better than I am---better, more lucid, more profound. But, I feel differently. I can’t put into words the feeling that flow through my body when my fingers glide slightly over her skin. I believe it a combination of electricity and magic, electrum; it flows both ways. And to look into her eyes, means the stilling of my heart, my breathing ceases, and common sense decomposes into a gibber. It’s like that moment before death where the physical world loosens its grip and the ecstasy of the divine envelopes the fleeting spirit, bringing it comfort and celestial elation. And when she turned her gaze, the world of shadow reasserted itself, the crass physical forms replacing the purity forms of the higher planes. I’m convinced that Plato wasn’t too amiss.

“You’re wasting away. Between these dark stories and staring at the computer screen, you’re wasting away. How long do you think your talent will last at this pace? Write something. Anything. Just don’t sit there in that chair and fade off into psychological oblivion.”

Oblivion. Been there, done that. I lived there once, before you. Cold, dark, soundless, as if being suspended in ether, it was everywhere; it was nowhere. Shortly after arriving there, illusions, horrific scenes of bitter death and feelings of isolation and despair, became more tolerable as my soul deadened. I survived as a germ survives---encapsulation. A shrunken particle of a soul, surrounded by a thick, almost impermeable shell, closed off to its environment. It never sheds a tear or flinches in pain or reacts to other germs, plagues, about it and show vulnerability.

But, then you came…the warmness of your surrounded what little of me remained. You were life, living, thriving, growing, becoming, sustaining. As you grew closer to me, what sustained you nourished me. Warmed and fed, I began to grow. In your presence I began to bud, to feel, to write. IM’s once brimming with emotionally crippled emoticons, were replaced by words with feelings, though inadequate, displayed more than any little yellow icon could ever display. When we finally made the leap to live together, with the promise of much more, I felt an exhilaration that has yet to subside. My love is so full that even I can’t completely comprehend it; my senses overwhelm me. I only know, because of you, I have never experienced life as fully as I experience it now.

Oblivion, though remembered, was not a threat to me; you are here.



“You know you are my heart,” And you my soul, she thought, “and in my heart, even through the years we were separated.”

All those years apart and still here we are. We started young, hot, furious, maybe too young for our own good, maybe not. Who knows where we might be had we not parted then? Would we have made it? Would we have torn each other apart? Do you understand what happened to me in those years? Everything, and nothing.

I married an older man. I was enraptured with the picture of a May-December romance, the road not taken. A ticket to the “grown-ups” table. Someone further ahead in life who could take care of me. He took care of me, alright. Made me feel inferior, unsexy, pushed the age difference in my face enough that I became the child and he…he acted like a tyrannical father. You, My Soul, are my best friend – my lover – my husband. When this other one wasn’t making me feel insufficient, he occupied his Don Quixote ego with other men’s wives he thought he could “rescue,” flirt with, then move on from. To you, Angel, I am the only woman in the world – and you treat me as if I am.

He kept me trapped, inserted himself between me and my friends, even my family. At the height of his anger, he was known to throw me to floors, drag me from my car, slam me against the wall and choke me. Later would arrive the flowers, the candy, the jewelry, but never the apology. “You force me to do that, see what happened,” was his response. You my love, would never think of such a thing. You hold me tight, just to hold me. You touch my neck to cup my face when you kiss me. When you bring me flowers they are not “fighting flowers” because you’ve hurt me, they are loving flowers, in my favorite blossoms.



“I’m trying to complete things I write, it’s just I get caught up in everything else.”



Yes, you get caught up in me. I escaped from the first mistake and walked right into the second one…a man whose attention was limited to cigarette in his mouth and the can of beer in his hand. Work more important than companionship. Sometimes getting no attention, no love, is the greatest abuse of all. You, my soul, love me – there are times when I have your attention to the exclusion of everything else. Your arms encircle me at night, you are happy to hold my hand when we walk through the city, and that gleaming, glowing stare into my eyes whenever we meet tells me all I need to know. And, yet, you give me my freedom to be alone when I need to be, only to love me more when we reunite.



“Sometimes, though, I lose my muse, and stutter in my thoughts. I don’t know quite to explain it.”



The dark, my husband, has dissipated. I was there once, after we had parted years ago. False hopes of shining gave way to a deeper blackness, and blackness to ambivalence. That spark that was us once was buried deep. I dreamed of that love, I wrote about it in stories that were about me and yet not me, with men who were not my husband. When you wrote me, the ember of our old love was buried under what I thought was a good marriage. But your words sang to me, stoking the glow to flame. And I remembered your voice, the comfort of my head tucked against your firm shoulder, the fragrance of the skin on your chest when I kissed it, the golden glow in your eyes, and I knew, I knew, where I belonged, with who I belonged, and to who belonged to me. I am as caught up in you, my soul, as you are in me.



“Once I purge myself, get this story out, and then I might be able to write our story, a happy story.”



You, my mate, and I are purged and that is why you can’t finish the story. At least, not the story you think you’re writing. You were not alone in that dark empty abyss, a place filled with the broken, the battered, the lost--- hearts, dreams, and souls. I had someone at home waiting for me, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t alone or that the man waiting at the door for me wasn’t going to greet me with a hit rather than a kiss or a hug.

I gave everything, I always did, but I never received enough to fill me. I, too, was in that black hole.

I hope you think about this, My Soul, that there are two possibilities for people who have fallen into black holes. The first disappears into its center, swallowed by its gravity, and crushed into the darkness. The second happens when two objects, circling the hole at tremendous speeds, are brought together and their energies merge. Particles are made, and one, of fantastic light and energy, is emitted and frees itself from the darkness. A second, the contrast to the brilliant one, falls into the depths of the singularity. We are the first; our combined force is more brilliant than a noon day sun. Let go that last bit of darkness, My Soul, let it be devoured so that we get fully and finally escape what has doomed too many others. Let it fall into oblivion.



“I don’t know, maybe you’re right, I should stop embracing the dark and write our story. What do you think? From the beginning. It’ll be…”

“Dark, but only for a little while.”