Dark
It was dark.
The kind of dark you can feel, thick and heavy.
Where was I?
What had happened?
How did I get here?
I did not know, but I knew it was dark.
I never did like the dark, as I imagine most don’t. Ever since I was a child, I was scared of the dark. The kind of scared that when the light switch is at the bottom of the basement stairs, you flick it and run as fast as you can up those stairs (and of course the stairs were open in the back so that any hand could come right through and grab you).
I’m not sure why I was so scared of the dark. Nothing bad had ever happened to me in the dark to cause a fear. Maybe it wasn’t the dark so much as what was unknown about the darkness. What is there in the dark? Or, is it the lack of something that makes it so ominous?
Void.
Empty.
Alone.
“Hello?” I said.
There was no answer.
The quiet was almost as bad as the darkness. A deafening silence. No white noise. No electronics humming. Nothing. You never realize just how loud the silence is, until there’s nothing to keep you from hearing it. The sound of my own breathing was the only distraction from my thoughts. Questions, but no answers.
