When the lights go out...
on darkness, and what it knows about you
I used to think about this as a child, what would happen if every light in the world went out at once, and the thought kept finding me at night long after I had stopped looking for it.
Most of our lives happen in brightness, and we have lived in it so long we forgot it was even there, the way you forget a river you grew up beside. We know each other by our faces, size each other up before a word has been said, and it happens so fast and so naturally that it never quite feels like what it is. But when the dark takes everything at once, you begin to wonder whether light had been doing that work all along, drawing lines between us we never thought to examine.
When your eyes stop being useful, the rest of you stirs, and sounds you have passed your whole life without hearing suddenly land differently, the branch outside, wind through a gap somewhere, the breathing of the person next to you carrying things their face had always known better than to show. We give our eyes so much of the work that everything else just waits around for years, patient and largely forgotten, for a moment like this one.
In the light, we are always sizing each other up, so constantly and so automatically that it long ago stopped feeling like a choice, and darkness clears all of that away until what remains is just the person, their voice, their presence, the bare fact of them being there beside you, which turns out to carry more weight than anything you could have seen.
There is fear in the dark, the old kind that lives below whatever part of you thinks it knows better. Still, running alongside it, there is something that feels surprisingly like relief, because the version of yourself you assemble each morning and carry into the world, the one that can be looked at and judged and come up short, finally gets to set itself down.
The things you kept at just enough distance that you never had to reckon with them, the longing you left somewhere reasonable and never went back for, the love that kept waiting for a better moment that never came, none of this was made by the dark, which only makes it harder to keep walking past.
When the lights go out, you do not go blind; you start making your way by feel, back toward everything that was always there.