Darkness, Sweet Darkness

• Shanae Cole, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2014

The darkness. My darkness. Comfortable. Peaceful. Safe. The place I once used to fear has, over time, become my sanctuary. When one thinks of darkness, they imagine demons and killers. Monsters and ghosts. They see only the blackness. And they feel. They feel the blindness. The hopelessness and pain. The growing fear. They expel it – try to escape it. But I welcome it. It closes my eyes and opens my mind. It plays with my hair and caresses my heart. The silence screams at me. It yells and shouts, keeping the horror at bay. I don’t fight it; it’s no longer my enemy. You see, fear of the darkness is a trick of the mind. The more you kick and struggle, the deeper you sink and the worse it gets. I have come to love it. To depend on it. It is invincible.

A murmur. A whisper. It pierces the silence, wriggling its way into my heart and soul. I can feel the darkness slowly slip away from me. The murmurs grow louder with every second, eventually forming a long string of syllables. It’s painful. Unbearable. My mind is exploding with noise, my soul possessed by it. And then there was the light.
It’s dull at first – a light grey against a sea of black. It grows brighter and brighter, as more streaks of light appear. It fights the darkness; overtaking it. The darkness shrinks back in weak tendrils and wraps itself around me. I cling to it, but I can feel the power of the light working its way between us. For a split second, my grip loosens, and then I lose it. Tendrils of light wrap themselves around my ankles and yank me back. I scream. I kick and struggle. But, like I said with darkness, the more I fight it, the harder it is to escape. Stuck in the hold of the light, I am powerless as it vanquishes the last of the darkness. And that is all it took to drive me mad. I am lost in light and noise, with no shadows to protect me. My body is aching and I lose all sense of thought. I scream one last time as my mind shatters into a million pieces. This is the end.

Flashes. Like flickering images on a television screen. A faint humming. Memories. So much memories. They flash across my eyes, blinding me, burning into my very core. One by one, I can feel my senses slowly coming back to me. I wiggle my fingers, my toes. I breathe in and out. My awareness sharpens and I hear a quiet beeping noise. The air smells sterile – like someone has poured a gallon of disinfectant over me. The humming noise grows and I can just barely make out three words, spoken in a gruff, professional voice. Depression. Attempted Suicide. The immediate realisation dawns on me in that instant – I am still alive. I hadn’t wanted to be.