I. Nyctophobia
Why do we say that we are afraid of the dark when it isn't the dark that we fear at all, but the possibility of what could be in the dark?
i remember being very young, sharing a bedroom with an even younger sister who had this fear that, to me, was always rather irrational. i imagined the nightmares that vibrated off the insides of her sweaty forehead as she woke us both from sleep with her cries of protest. i concocted my own visualizations of her terror. i felt the sticky, trembling paranoia that i imagined 'scared of the dark' held. i felt the darkness stuff my mouth with its dry gauzy emptiness. i felt it slip its shadowboned fingers into my ears, taking over my consciousness. i imagined being filled with darkness then pulled inside out, my skin underneath exposed organs. smoky, burdening darkness weighed heavy on my mangled body, filling spaces between bone and blood. blacked out, i was consumed, erased by the darkness. i felt the syncopated meter of my thudding ghost heart rustling the tiny hairs in my dark filled ears. i blinked my invisible eyes furiously, pointing them at the void spaces where my body should have been. but, my arms and my alf nightshirt had been commandered, painted night-colored. gone. shudder-shook and gleefully terrified, only half aware of my willing suspension of disbelief, i would turn around and face the kaleidoscope of golden parallelograms that were thrown and stretched across our bedroom floor by the street light outside the window. i would let the delicious thrill of half-terror slowly drip away from my heart spaces,slide down my stomach settle around my ankles and then disappear. the 100 watt reminder of my existence, of the life that my skin and bone body proved, poured through the doorway and caressed the soft heaps of girl body under my comforter. i would look over at my silly sleeping sister, the reason that the bright light was still on during sleeping hours and i would think how stupid she was to be afraid of a dumb old harmless thing like darkness. dark was pretend strong like superman. and our weapon of choice was kryptonite in a glass bulb.
i was obsessed with other peoples emotions as a kid. especially the ones like love and fear and pain. the ones that made bodies jerk spastically and eyes pour. i would sit still and silent and watch as terrible things floated through the breath they exhaled. i would try to suck it in, feel it coat the insides of my wet throat. but i couldn't swallow it. i used to spend hours writing stories in notebooks, speculating on the world of adult realities that were infinitely expansive in my half comprehending mind. nobody remembered to tell me that we were supposed to say things that we didn't mean.
i remember my moms flat palm rubbing my shoulder and squeezing my arm, pulling my body up tight to her side. she looked at me with worrying eyes. the kind of not understanding question filled eyes that sent my consiousness catapulting over recently passed days, searching for and listing all the things that i could have done or forgotten to do. usually the hot blanket of 'expecting answers' mom stares lead to big trouble unless i had a good explanation. she flipped through the mostly filled pages of a lisa frank notebook. a familiar notebook, with flourescent kittens in sunglasses on the cover. a notebook who's stories were never intended to be read by previously mentioned mother's eyes. remembering pulled on my guts and balled up fists in my throat. 'holy crap, i hope she didn't read the whole thing' i said silently. 'holy crap, i hope i didn't write any bad words like 'holy crap'', i thought next.
she pulled my chin up with one finger, forcing eye contact. 'are you okay, kiddo?' she asked seeming more wondering than accusing. this made me feel better. 'you've been spending an awful lot of time writing your little stories lately and some of them are kinda weird and scary.' i swallowed hard to flatten out the tear filled bubbles that were choking me. i hated these talks. they were the talks that made me hide lisa frank notebooks under my pillow and scrawl stories by flashlight underneath my blankets when i supposed to be sleeping. they were the talks that always ended in questions about if i was making friends at my new school. (i was not) and lies about if i was still writing stories on the bench by the fence during recess (i was). this talk ended in murder.
her time-sterilized adult voice stole my adventures and my revelations, my inventions and my creations. she read my stories out loud to me. her voice didn't go up to do girl voices and didn't lift to meet the surprises in 'finding out' moments. she bleached out all the colors i stood so still to remember and record. she only made a loud and obvious voice to spit out all the ugly parts. she stripped the soft skin from the blood soaked bones of my fairy tales, frowning and making confused faces to remind me how little sense my macabre and childish stories made. she never looked up from my shameful notebook. i don't think she even knew i stood there naked, raw and bleeding, turned inside out and exposed. her toungue smoothed over my new dictionary word, 'grotesque' without stuttering. she didn't even look up and ask me what it meant or how i knew how to spell such a long and elegant grown up word. in her mouth, 'grotesque' was just 2 syllables in the chain of words which she pulled from her mouth like a magician's infinite rope of silk scarves. my words accumulated and expanded as she rubbed coarse grained salt into my leaking wounds. her voice scraped along my painstakingly transcribed remembered things.
"the girl sat in that airplane seat and stared out the round window at the metal wing that stuck out from the side of the metal tube she sat in. she thought about how stupid her mom is for accusing her of being 'afraid of flying'. the girl was not afraid of flying, she was afraid of crashing. she thought about what would happen if the airplane tripped and fell out of the invisible sky shaped hand that held it up. she imagined the screams that would claw their way out of peoples mouths. even the adult people, parent people, pilot people, that had to pretend 10 year old girls were retarded for being scared. they would all scream too. and as bones smashed across seats and fire swallowed stangers' heads and melted their skin, they would look at the girl. and they would see the crap plastic wings that they had pinned on her shirt while they talked to her like a baby and made her feel stupid for crying. they would feel sorry that they made her wear that dumb ass pin on her shirt. they would wish they had listened to that girl while the meat inside their black skin cooked them dead."
she made me a murderer that night. she made me a pervert, a masterbating voyeur,as she read my hastily scribbled account of every fascinating second of Alec Woodmans descent from the cold steel monkey bars to the skin opening, blood pulling cement. her narration left little pauses in the words i had written, to remind me that there were holes there were sympathy should have gone. and there were words where notebooks and pencils should have been put down for 'running to tell a teacher'. silent justifications simmered gently but were subdued by pressed shut lips. she never did get that elbow bones sticking through split skin wrote their own lines on the air and i just snatched them and taped them down on my notebooks blue veined pages. elbow bones tell secrets and science book lies. bones are rainy sky gray colored, not white like halloween skeleton colored. Alec's broken elbow told me that.
" it came out covered in blood spots and black rocky dust from the asphault. it looked at the kids playing and at the girl who came to interview it. it was rainy sky grey colored and it came with screams from the back of Alecs throat. the arm it glued together came apart. the skin covered the dead arm and the still alive boy had seizures on the cement, loud shouts and fast tears made everything stop and turn towards. for one second the elbow bone smiled at the mess it had made of things. it laughed at the chinese jumpropes still wrapped around kids knees and the jumpers that stopped in the middle of the air to turn and see where the broken classmate screams were coming from. then the teachers and the whistle blowing sounds and the scooping up Alec arms cleared the show away and there was just a tiny dot of grey bone blood on the cement, to remind everybody of that great day and about the elbow and about the way Alec screamed like a girl".
she was the voice of darwin that nudged doubt into my storytelling world. i was god in the worlds i created on paper. she introduced evolution to the things i created. they were changed slightly after that day. my stories were dusted with censorship and they took on the forms of things that were better suited to the exposed places. i miss the clumsy, irrational words. i want to smash the skulls that cover adult brains and pluck out the meaty chunks that hold things i don't know. but, growing up makes that macabre. so, i commisserate with my backspace key, defacing the stories that living writes.
they copyright the life that spills when i slice open veins and pour edited memories onto bandages. they correct the punctuation and they tell me its not good enough. thick skinned, under my comforter with a flashlight, i laugh at them. these words wrote themselves, they are the font faced receipt of the life i've lived. mom voices and cash prizes can't scribble doubt in the margins. pen loops form cursive armies and words wage war with doubters and haters, fakers and liars. we are the music makers and the dreamers of dreams.
Why do we say that we are afraid of the dark when it isn't the dark that we fear at all, but the possibility of what could be in the dark?
i remember being very young, sharing a bedroom with an even younger sister who had this fear that, to me, was always rather irrational. i imagined the nightmares that vibrated off the insides of her sweaty forehead as she woke us both from sleep with her cries of protest. i concocted my own visualizations of her terror. i felt the sticky, trembling paranoia that i imagined 'scared of the dark' held. i felt the darkness stuff my mouth with its dry gauzy emptiness. i felt it slip its shadowboned fingers into my ears, taking over my consciousness. i imagined being filled with darkness then pulled inside out, my skin underneath exposed organs. smoky, burdening darkness weighed heavy on my mangled body, filling spaces between bone and blood. blacked out, i was consumed, erased by the darkness. i felt the syncopated meter of my thudding ghost heart rustling the tiny hairs in my dark filled ears. i blinked my invisible eyes furiously, pointing them at the void spaces where my body should have been. but, my arms and my alf nightshirt had been commandered, painted night-colored. gone. shudder-shook and gleefully terrified, only half aware of my willing suspension of disbelief, i would turn around and face the kaleidoscope of golden parallelograms that were thrown and stretched across our bedroom floor by the street light outside the window. i would let the delicious thrill of half-terror slowly drip away from my heart spaces,slide down my stomach settle around my ankles and then disappear. the 100 watt reminder of my existence, of the life that my skin and bone body proved, poured through the doorway and caressed the soft heaps of girl body under my comforter. i would look over at my silly sleeping sister, the reason that the bright light was still on during sleeping hours and i would think how stupid she was to be afraid of a dumb old harmless thing like darkness. dark was pretend strong like superman. and our weapon of choice was kryptonite in a glass bulb.
i was obsessed with other peoples emotions as a kid. especially the ones like love and fear and pain. the ones that made bodies jerk spastically and eyes pour. i would sit still and silent and watch as terrible things floated through the breath they exhaled. i would try to suck it in, feel it coat the insides of my wet throat. but i couldn't swallow it. i used to spend hours writing stories in notebooks, speculating on the world of adult realities that were infinitely expansive in my half comprehending mind. nobody remembered to tell me that we were supposed to say things that we didn't mean.
i remember my moms flat palm rubbing my shoulder and squeezing my arm, pulling my body up tight to her side. she looked at me with worrying eyes. the kind of not understanding question filled eyes that sent my consiousness catapulting over recently passed days, searching for and listing all the things that i could have done or forgotten to do. usually the hot blanket of 'expecting answers' mom stares lead to big trouble unless i had a good explanation. she flipped through the mostly filled pages of a lisa frank notebook. a familiar notebook, with flourescent kittens in sunglasses on the cover. a notebook who's stories were never intended to be read by previously mentioned mother's eyes. remembering pulled on my guts and balled up fists in my throat. 'holy crap, i hope she didn't read the whole thing' i said silently. 'holy crap, i hope i didn't write any bad words like 'holy crap'', i thought next.
she pulled my chin up with one finger, forcing eye contact. 'are you okay, kiddo?' she asked seeming more wondering than accusing. this made me feel better. 'you've been spending an awful lot of time writing your little stories lately and some of them are kinda weird and scary.' i swallowed hard to flatten out the tear filled bubbles that were choking me. i hated these talks. they were the talks that made me hide lisa frank notebooks under my pillow and scrawl stories by flashlight underneath my blankets when i supposed to be sleeping. they were the talks that always ended in questions about if i was making friends at my new school. (i was not) and lies about if i was still writing stories on the bench by the fence during recess (i was). this talk ended in murder.
her time-sterilized adult voice stole my adventures and my revelations, my inventions and my creations. she read my stories out loud to me. her voice didn't go up to do girl voices and didn't lift to meet the surprises in 'finding out' moments. she bleached out all the colors i stood so still to remember and record. she only made a loud and obvious voice to spit out all the ugly parts. she stripped the soft skin from the blood soaked bones of my fairy tales, frowning and making confused faces to remind me how little sense my macabre and childish stories made. she never looked up from my shameful notebook. i don't think she even knew i stood there naked, raw and bleeding, turned inside out and exposed. her toungue smoothed over my new dictionary word, 'grotesque' without stuttering. she didn't even look up and ask me what it meant or how i knew how to spell such a long and elegant grown up word. in her mouth, 'grotesque' was just 2 syllables in the chain of words which she pulled from her mouth like a magician's infinite rope of silk scarves. my words accumulated and expanded as she rubbed coarse grained salt into my leaking wounds. her voice scraped along my painstakingly transcribed remembered things.
"the girl sat in that airplane seat and stared out the round window at the metal wing that stuck out from the side of the metal tube she sat in. she thought about how stupid her mom is for accusing her of being 'afraid of flying'. the girl was not afraid of flying, she was afraid of crashing. she thought about what would happen if the airplane tripped and fell out of the invisible sky shaped hand that held it up. she imagined the screams that would claw their way out of peoples mouths. even the adult people, parent people, pilot people, that had to pretend 10 year old girls were retarded for being scared. they would all scream too. and as bones smashed across seats and fire swallowed stangers' heads and melted their skin, they would look at the girl. and they would see the crap plastic wings that they had pinned on her shirt while they talked to her like a baby and made her feel stupid for crying. they would feel sorry that they made her wear that dumb ass pin on her shirt. they would wish they had listened to that girl while the meat inside their black skin cooked them dead."
she made me a murderer that night. she made me a pervert, a masterbating voyeur,as she read my hastily scribbled account of every fascinating second of Alec Woodmans descent from the cold steel monkey bars to the skin opening, blood pulling cement. her narration left little pauses in the words i had written, to remind me that there were holes there were sympathy should have gone. and there were words where notebooks and pencils should have been put down for 'running to tell a teacher'. silent justifications simmered gently but were subdued by pressed shut lips. she never did get that elbow bones sticking through split skin wrote their own lines on the air and i just snatched them and taped them down on my notebooks blue veined pages. elbow bones tell secrets and science book lies. bones are rainy sky gray colored, not white like halloween skeleton colored. Alec's broken elbow told me that.
" it came out covered in blood spots and black rocky dust from the asphault. it looked at the kids playing and at the girl who came to interview it. it was rainy sky grey colored and it came with screams from the back of Alecs throat. the arm it glued together came apart. the skin covered the dead arm and the still alive boy had seizures on the cement, loud shouts and fast tears made everything stop and turn towards. for one second the elbow bone smiled at the mess it had made of things. it laughed at the chinese jumpropes still wrapped around kids knees and the jumpers that stopped in the middle of the air to turn and see where the broken classmate screams were coming from. then the teachers and the whistle blowing sounds and the scooping up Alec arms cleared the show away and there was just a tiny dot of grey bone blood on the cement, to remind everybody of that great day and about the elbow and about the way Alec screamed like a girl".
she was the voice of darwin that nudged doubt into my storytelling world. i was god in the worlds i created on paper. she introduced evolution to the things i created. they were changed slightly after that day. my stories were dusted with censorship and they took on the forms of things that were better suited to the exposed places. i miss the clumsy, irrational words. i want to smash the skulls that cover adult brains and pluck out the meaty chunks that hold things i don't know. but, growing up makes that macabre. so, i commisserate with my backspace key, defacing the stories that living writes.
they copyright the life that spills when i slice open veins and pour edited memories onto bandages. they correct the punctuation and they tell me its not good enough. thick skinned, under my comforter with a flashlight, i laugh at them. these words wrote themselves, they are the font faced receipt of the life i've lived. mom voices and cash prizes can't scribble doubt in the margins. pen loops form cursive armies and words wage war with doubters and haters, fakers and liars. we are the music makers and the dreamers of dreams.
oks back to reading ^^