ab initio, ad infinitum

dark.

HELLO WONDERFUL PEOPLE! so this is something i found lurking in my computer and decided 'hey, why not post it?' so here i am posting it. (note, this one is also pretty off-tangent, but that's alright) so please enjoy while i die over school! do good, be well. <3 

D A R K .

There is a need I have, to go out an explore. To find and discover, to understand the world as it spins on its axis. I want to figure out how I slot into the world, I want to be a part of something grand and big, something that makes me feel aligned with the enormity of the universe.

I want to see the world, so I put out the lights around me, because darkness is the only way to find our true selves. Only in the darkness do we allows ourselves to be the whole selves we deny in the daylight, because darkness is safety, darkness is danger, darkness is unknown. And if you want to find the unknown, you must go into it.

And as I sit in the faint glow of the stars above-head, eyes adjusting to the sparse light, I can see the shadows and brightness that make up our world. I see the faint impression of things we miss in the sun, and I no longer can see those things that we always deemed so big otherwise. In the darkness, a change begins, where life shifts into focus underneath those stars, and the exploration begins.

It feels like bells at the beginning, or windchimes rustling gently in the wind. It feels like little pinpricks running up my spine, deliciously cold fingertips sending my nerve-ends alight. It's physical sensation at first, a sense of ease that washes over. The sensation of being so aware and keyed up yet never more relaxed, feeling the darkness slowly take your vision and give you touch instead.

Soon the violins start, satiny and smooth. I can hear all the little sounds, hear things the darkness doesn't allow you see. Instead, darkness forces you to scope things in their truest form, to explore what the true meaning of things are. And when you hear, everything slowly melds together, a fusion of the unlikely into a soft blanket that drapes over every inch of your skin, reminding you of now now now and complete complete complete.

Eventually I realize that piano keys have been played all the while, as my awareness slowly plays with the controls, making the taste a little brighter. The darkness shouldn't have a taste, but it did. Sweet but metallic, a twang hitting the back of your throat as you accept that this is it. This is how you can swallow and force up all those emotions you don't feel in the light, because the light leaves you open. It is in the light we are at our most guarded, because we are so vulnerable.

And similarly, in the guard of the dark, we become our most vulnerable.

Soon, we become beings at the mere disposal of our senses, and we soften, becoming the truest essence of ourselves. In the darkness, our defenses fall, leaving us at our most human yet least recognizable.

(as I said, I wanted to discover the unknown)

And in the darkness we become malleable. We become putty, shaping into whatever need be, and we find ourselves slotting ourselves into the universe we feel so misplaced in. Our superiority, our jealously, our envy, our rage; the ugly things we feel don't matter as we allow ourselves to mould into the world around us. Because when we melt into the earth, all of us is accepted. We no longer fear judgement for the worst parts of ourselves when it all gets absorbed into the natural order of things, simply because we do not matter, and there is almost nothing as reassuring as knowing that we do not matter.

Because for living a life where everything just amounts to something, where I cannot slow down in fear that I miss out on something, in fear that the meaning I quest after may just cruise by me when I'm not looking, knowing I do not matter in the end helps. It does not matter if your legacy lasts a day or centuries, it amounts to nothing just like everyone else's when put against the backdrop of the world we live on, and the galaxy it spins in, and the universe it makes a small part of.

We will die out and ebb in the way species have before us, and like life, we will pass on, we will decay, and we will return to the soil for new life to grow in our place. In the darkness, we become our trustiest selves; our souls come out to play in the dark. For our souls cannot see, but feel. Our bright, effervescent souls are what makes us us. And I do not know where they go yet – whether they rot with us and sink into the earth, or if they drift in the spaces that fill our world, or if they become glimmering stars in the distance. I do not know what becomes of our souls past the darkness; just that in the dark, under that cover, the fibers of our being start to shine as they never do otherwise.

And part of me wonders, if that's what those shadows in the dark are. If they are simply echoes of the life that once was where we are now. I wonder if people or places or things that grew like us, stepped into the darkness like us, felt like us. I wonder if the darkness is where the last bits of them remain, creating that synergy that flows right through our bones and straight into the ground again.

I wonder if that's what will become of us as well. Will we simply become the shadows and echoes for another race of beings to come into contact with and wonder about? Will we just be ghost stories?

Ghost stories and darkness pair so well together; unsuspectingly yet unsurprisingly. They can be so different yet slot together so well. Because while ghost stories have grown to be synonymous with bad, they are the same as any other stories, just of things now gone. Ghost stories are the phantoms of what used to be.

And the darkness is just what allows ghost stories to be heard.

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