I met a man who bled to death.  He slit his wrist with shards from his pocketwatch.  He said that bleeding to death is like nothing you’ve ever experienced.  It’s like someone threw turpentine on the outline of the world.  He said the separation between him and the stained linoleum faded until there was no distinction between man and floor. 

I once walked through a valley of trees so dense they blotted the moon.  After that, I believed that losing yourself in the darkness is only a cliché to people who live in the city.  The grey of London’s 2:30AM is minor astigmatism, but the darkness of the forest is blindness.  I used to cover one eye when I went to the restroom late at night because I wanted to see the different between and eye exposed to light and one exposed to darkness, but when the moon is blotted, your pupils don’t bother to dilate. 

You feel frantic, you feel expansive.  You are afraid because this breath was oxygen but the next could be dust or liquid nitrogen.  Your feet shuffle a cowardly squaredance through pine needles and your hands wave like antenna. 

If you could find something solid, it would be different, but as long as you stand with no stabilization, you are inconcrete.  Space is vacuous and you are matter.  Your lines are blurry, and you are terrified, not of the dark, but of your identity. 

It doesn’t matter, who you are.  Not in the dark. 

What terrifies you about the dark is not what is out there, but what isn’t.  You are a mirror.  Effervescent, you are tendrils of smoke, you are the feathery appendages of a stilled lightning storm, you are a fossil.  And that pressure on your chest is not the pressure of the atmosphere on you, compressing your sternum, restricting your diaphragm; that is the pressure of the inside, like a balloon too full, the tendency of all particles, your soul, to entropically gravitate towards areas of lower concentration.  Get some light, quick, before it’s all gone, faded into the atmosphere like breath on a cold night. 

There is no dark in the city.  Just beige.