There are times when our substance leaks into the cracks and crevasses of the world and we become less substantial. We begin to fade into translucency.
It is as if light has decided that we are not worthy of being the terminal destination of its journey and instead bends around us looking for something more valuable to reflect off and bring into view.
Thus, we are left spectral, where people seem not to notice… we are a blur in their vision. They wipe their glasses or rub their eyes in an attempt to explain the smudge that we are in their perception.
Our noises are muffled and smothered as if produced underwater. Any attraction they might gain in others seems to be momentary and quickly dismissed as just a distortion of ambient sound.
We see our own efforts as irrelevant. Even those things we have accomplished we realize would have been completed by others had we not been present, reducing our importance to negligible, if even that.
The darkness does not surround us, it consumes us, infiltrating every pore and orifice until it is unclear where we end and it begins. Its invasiveness is fluid, filling the empty space.
And the hollowness we have created, allowing the rot and decay of our choices and experiences to fester and liquefy, draining away our core, fills with the mercurial black, heavy and thick.
We may be tempted to turn our anger and hurt and fear toward the world and embrace the inky void, but we know that we are prey in this place, and have no control of the monsters that are at home here.
We cannot impress with a macabre façade, because it is instantly revealed that we are but flotsam in the streams of dark despair, carried with the other waste, not able to harness it for our own uses.
So we hide, hoping that our inconsequential existence will provide camouflage, willing the denizens of the abyss to seek more succulent prey, but the strong are known to victimize the weak, even here.
We know we can produce light, like flint striking steel, if only we can muster the effort. If we can overcome the profound lethargy that the lie of the darkness whispers into our souls.
(http://thejameybear.com/siobhan-chapter-3-a-spark-in-the-darksiobhan-chapter-three-spark-dark/)
But there are times when we relinquish ourselves to the embrace of nothingness, feeling that we float in an embrace rather than realizing we are drowning in then venom of the world.
Ultimately, it is the spark of another that provides us a bearing out of the midnight fog. One who cares more for us than we did for ourselves and struck the steel while we were romanced by the darkness.
And as we arouse from slumber and accept the ember which is fanned into flame, restoring us for a while, we wonder…. Why?
And the only answer that satisfies is that within us, whether is a willingness to see the smudge in our own vision, hear the distortion in our ears, as someone else slips beneath the night waves.
And with that is a willingness to strike a spark into someone else’s darkness, despite our own state. And it is that part of us that draws those that offer light to us when we are lost in the void.