The Darkness Knows Your Name

Once you have been to the darkest part of yourself, the darkest part of the night, the darkness knows your name.  It's as if it remembers your smell, your shape & seeks out your company forever more.  It thinks you belong in the dark, for it is a hungry space that is constantly filled over & over with the emptiness we feel. It feeds on our pain.

It is a shadow that beckons us in the coldest of moments. Even in between the moments of joy, it can howl your name. Make you wonder if you are hearing things amidst the laughter & pleasure you savor. 

You suddenly feel it creep in without notice & find yourself looking around the room, the world to see what just changed even though nothing actually has. It's just you being summoned by your grief, by your sadness. By the darkness. 

When the energy of the day has waned & you crumble between the spaces of your life, between the fatigue in your back & the over extension of will to finish one more thing, accomplish one more thing, connect with one more person so you don't have to feel the solitude of your humanity, done with the day, the darkness creeps in uninvited. It knows you are there. 

In between the parts that feed you & the parts that bleed you, this is when the darkness sets in. It senses vulnerability & weakness, it senses you are alone & beaten by the day and creeps in, perhaps thinking it is a friend & will comfort you. Yet it does not.

It feels that fatigue & slithers in backwards so you don't see it coming. It beckons you once again. 

But it is an empty space that demands more & more no matter how much of your soul you give it. So it cannot continue if you are to. At some point, one must rise up & fight the darkness, even if it feels like it's teeth have already sunken in. Resist it. Keep walking away.

And this is what you know you must do if you are going to continue to survive this all encompassing darkness, this hollow space that sucks the very life out of your soul and dampens the will to soldier on...resist it. With every piece of rope & sinew in your body, turn your back on the shadow & tell it, 

'Not this time, thank you. I'm busy livin'.  

There may be a time when you can sit with the darkness, listen to what it's trying to tell you, it's secrets, it's pain. See if it holds a message that will grow your wings and use it for some deeper mystery to be solved. But tonight is not that night. 

Tonight you want to continue with the joy of the day, the potential for more & the hope that you can stave off the grief & worry, one more day. Tell the shadow to go find some other secret place to burrow itself into, instead of haunting you. 

5/3/©DM

Moving on is Hard

Leaving behind the past is like trying to leave a limb behind. Whether it be old friends who have fallen like leaves by the wayside of time, old ways of being that no longer fit with a new soul, old wounds & sorrows that haunt you. Forgoing a huge part of yourself because it seemingly no longer has an obvious use yet you're still attached to it, is a huge mountain to crawl over. It's like leaving an entire leg behind and then trying to run, you can't. But you know you must let go of things long past alive so you can live now, in the present instead of carrying around the wounds, heartaches and even fond memories of the past. The memories cling to you like the smell of smoke after walking through fire. 

You're forced to crawl away slowly, painfully leaving a bloody trail reminding you of what you left behind, a giant piece of yourself. All you've known. A huge part of who you were, is now gone. 

You're left to recreate the next part of your life, figuring out who you are now without the familiar weight of the past guiding you. If anything, it moors you, locking you into a long forgotten way of being that may or may not serve your life as you are now. The truth about starting over is that it's terrifyingly blank if you don't already have an idea of who you are & where you want to go. If you do then count yourself lucky.  If you really are starting over, then hang on for a bumpy ride.  

At first you constantly feel the past haunting you like a sad, hungry ghost with a deep need to be seen, as if the past never left.  Please remember me, please come back with me now, things were better then. Just like one might think they feel a lost leg that it's still there, but it's not. Neither is your past but in your own mind, boiling over & over as you process the losses, the pain & the remnants of lust, cooking your thoughts down to a mushy vague feeling so that you cannot think clearly.  Dulled by the constant pangs of sadness or guilt, or the yearnings no longer being satisfied. You are consumed by what was and the fear that it may never be again.

Because truthfully, you miss it. It may have hurt then or felt better but it was familiar, it existed. It was real. Now you're lost without this framework helping you figure out what happens next. Will it, things, love, pain, experience happen again? There is great uncertainty & thus, loss. Real solitude as you begin again. 

It's only after you've been crawling for awhile and get far enough away from your past that it starts to fade into the background. It becomes a thin phantom of a memory wisping about instead of an ever present ghost trying to relive things gone by.  Reminding you of failures, fears & passion that you feel slipping sadly, longingly into the background of your soul, out of reach.  But for a long while as you move through the present, you feel every bump in the road and that reminds you that you no longer have that leg, or the past.  That it's gone and all you can do is remember it, miss it and then grieve it's departure from your life. And that is a truly heart-wrenching passage to go through, like carrying around the weight of your own sadness. 

4/27/22©Dm. 

Borrowed Image: Tareck Raffoul