Acquainted with the Night

The night was scary when I was little. I hated the dark, but couldn’t bear to sleep so long as the light was on, any light, burning on the other side of my eyelids.



I used to have nightmares about dark things in dark corners, shadowy figures with shadowy fingers trailing along my spine. I always woke up cold and fumbling frantically for the lamp, but the aura of light just made the shadows deeper and I turned it off quickly.



Black holes are dead stars. Graves. Tombs that bury light, bury it so deep, swallow entire suns, planets, galaxies. Dead stars take all the light with them like rich men spending fortunes on alabaster monuments and marble headstones.



When I was twelve a boy grabbed my hand for the first time during a projector lesson as we sat in the back with the lights dimmed and maybe I started hating the dark a little less.



I took a poetry class in high school and we read Spenser and Shakespeare and sometimes we wrote about our feelings and other times we wrote about nothing in particular. I read Frost and wrote about the black holes pulling at my toes.



He wanted to go see a horror movie, but I would never be brave enough for that. We went to a comedy instead and he still held my hand for a moment whenever we reached into the popcorn bucket at the same time and the dimmed lights didn’t bother me.



There are four unmarked graves in the cemetery near my house. I counted the night we all went together as a group one Halloween. Two of my friends disappeared for a while and we all pretended not to notice and Jack had a wine bottle he stole from his parents but he decided he didn’t feel like sharing.



Our last poetry assignment was to write about what we hated. The normal ones were about parents or school and the whiny ones were egocentric and one person wrote about trees, but mine was about sunsets.



I stopped having nightmares and started leaving the curtains open to let in the moonlight and a boy though my window.



So maybe I don’t hate sunsets.