There are nights so thick with darkness it crushes you, the heaviness of absence.
You forget light was ever a thing.
not just noticing the lack of its warmth, but the cold being so normal that talk of anything else seems like a lie, just something people say to keep you hoping.
You stop looking for the sun.
You stopped looking ages ago, and things stopped. Full stop.
It wasn’t like a spring day cascading through a movie set window, nor the beauty of a golden sunrise across your face, highlighting the transformation… not a clichéd Phoenix from these dark ashes… but
just a hairline crack in the oppressive night.
A suggestion. A glimpse into something else…You’d have missed it if
you’d blinked too slowly.
It doesn’t warm you.
It doesn’t save you.
It doesn’t even make sense.
But if you let yourself look it just reminds you
that something else might also be true.
Not one. Not the other.
And that’s the hard part:
holding the notion of two truths
in this same body.
That despair can feel endless,
but still —
still —
a shard of good can wedge its way in
like a fault line in an unending continent.
or a whisper
you almost mistrust.
You want to brush it off,
chalk it up to luck or delusion—
because how can something
so slight stand up against all this weight? How can you accept this light and still have people understand how hard this is? How can I believe this in the face of the other?
But that’s the trick..
The light doesn’t banish the dark.
It doesn’t need to.
It just proves it’s not all there is. There is energy in this void, stars in the darkness.
And when you stop demanding one
to destroy the other, you start seeing it:
cracks everywhere.
Hairlines.
Faults.
Edges you can pry open with time and breath and bare hands.
Not to fix the dark— but to breathe inside it. To let a little more warmth in.
To live with it and notice the stars.
