Darkness

It’s a funny thing, darkness. Each dark is different. Sometimes it is a warm, blanketing dark; it holds you tight and rocks you off to sleep. Sometimes it’s cold. A painful, stinging cold that seems to shiver.

I like the kind of dark I can control. Closing my eyes, feeling the heat of the sun on my eyelids, the wind flowing through my hair, and the sound of the sea ringing in my ears. It isn’t whole; the skin which makes my darkness lets light in still. But it’s enough, it’s calm.

You can’t control your darkness. It creeps up on you in the night. It stabs straight into your heart, wakes you with a jolt and holds you in its vice-like grip. You drug it with sleep and hope it lets you go by morning, knowing that it will just hold tighter, consuming all the good, growing larger second by second, until you can’t breathe for the weight on your chest. I’ve known your darkness. Yours flinches at the sight of me, bearing the scars of a war I won. It knows I’ve come to drown it out.

It knows I’ve come to kill it.

Author's Note

A random bit of free-writing. (Thanks for the tip, have made minor adjustments.)

Reviews

[Marie]

I read this twice before I could reconcile the first stanza with the second; they seem to be two different concepts.
One suggestion: "Yours fliches at the sight of me...: possibly "flinches..."