Fingernails get picked at along their edges until they crack, and it isn’t very obvious. Otherwise, you are looking so normal. Expressionless, and still—maybe too still—with just a calm face outwardly.
But the blackness is on the inside. It is pulsing there, shifting and eclipsing itself as it builds. It is a kaleidoscope of blackness.
Some people’s blackness is hungry. It is a great big swallowing mouth that feasts on emotion and memories, sucking its host dry of all enthusiasm, until there is just emptiness. Mine isn’t that way. I’m convinced that if it was I could just throw things at it to eat forever. I’d fill it up, and sustain us both together, and the hungry blackness and I would never be quite empty. I like to feed people, and things too. I’m good at it.
My blackness is the cousin of the all-consuming hungry one. It most often prefers to sit on the fringe of the mind, just twiddling its thumbs, just making its presence known. Maybe I shouldn’t call it a mean name—it is my most loyal companion—so I will just call it my blackness. It has been with me my entire life. My blackness is a bit like an overbearing friend I suppose. Most of the time I’m pretty good at telling it to shut up.
But once in a blue moon, for reasons many varied, it starts to get the upper-hand. It starts that building and shifting, that kaleidoscope of shades of dark storm clouds and black puddles. Muddled up paint water and cobwebby shadows. All things morbid. All things that block out the light.
Creatures of the light, such as myself, feel strangled by it. The rising sensation of that blackness multiplying, the adrenaline, makes the heart race and the breath held onto tightly. The boarders are closed, and the lungs will only allow little quick bursts of air to scamper in and out.
Blackness has walked you into a corner. It stands over you, its muscles rippling, as the dominant force. There you are, a cowering little mouse of a human, picking at those strong fingernails until they crack. But we humans are in fact animals. A mouse wouldn’t sit there and cower—it would run.
Step one: you get up. The body loves to move. The blackness doesn’t like it when you aren’t cowering.
Step two: open the boarders. The lungs really do like to meet lots of new, fresh oxygen.
Step three: acknowledge that all dynasties and empires come to an end. Rome rose; Rome fell. Wars begin; wars end. This day, this instant, this feeling—it too shall pass.
Step four: get busy. Idle hands are the devils workshop. An idle mind with blackness growing rampant in it needs to have a tarp throw across, so that the sunlight and heat of activity will kill all the weeds.
The unexpected entrance of someone with familiar smelling skin that you can press your nose against, and big thick hands that sort of meld overtop of yours, and facial hair to rub against your cheek which is scratchy but oddly pleasant—all of that is helpful too. Husbands are useful, now and then.
The tricky thing about the blackness is that it is never gone forever. You might not have seen it for a while, and get a false sense of security in thinking that you have bested it once and for all. But it always comes back, to some degree. It is a life-long companion. That sort of loyalty—it’s respectable.
And maybe it is a bit of an honor. People that have blackness are so much stronger than those without, because we know our blackness, and we have already faced it. People that don’t know their blackness yet, now that is intimidating.
I wish us all—those with blackness and those that don’t know theirs yet—fast growing fingernails.