What if tonight, when you’re scared and alone, with one arm hanging off the edge of your bed, the darkness reaches up and holds your hand?
What if, instead of pulling back in fear, you hold onto the hand of darkness, and you tug. And what if you drag the darkness out from underneath the bed. It struggles and kicks, but you don’t let go. You drag it up onto your bed and throw your arms around it so that it can’t escape. You can hear both your heart and its heart pounding in fear but you don’t let go. And finally the darkness gives up the struggle and goes quiet.
Why did you touch my hand? you demand, trying to keep the fear out of your voice. Why are you always lurking down there, trying to scare the hell out of me?
The darkness doesn’t answer. Instead, it reaches out a hand you cannot see and touches your face. It’s a gentle, hesitant touch. The fingers of the darkness are cold, but not with malice, you realize. They are cold with fear, and longing.
The hand of the darkness moves again, takes your hand gently, and moves it to its own heart. You feel the heart of the darkness beating frantically against your palm. You understand what the darkness has felt all these nights, huddled under your bed, longing and waiting but terrified also that this day would come when you would meet face to face and it would be forced to profess how it really feels about you.
You pull your hand away. You’re afraid again, but not the same way as you were before. You want the darkness gone. And it knows this. It moves away from you. It stands beside your bed.
There’s a low rumbling from the darkness beyond the darkness. Then a pair of dim lights appear and grow. A vehicle of shadows pulls up beside your bed and stops. On its roof is a glowing silver disk, and on its side, in phosphorescent letters, the word Nightcab.
The darkness climbs into the backseat and the Nightcab drives off. You’re still sitting in your bed, and there’s light coming in through the window. A grey light, like dirty dishwater. It will be morning very soon. Time to get up and get ready for work.
2 Comments on The Darkness: A Love Story, last added: 3/13/2013
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