To sit in the illumination of the sun is easy. It warms the skin, its streams are pleasant & becoming. Everyone looks like an angel when golden rays of light are peering down on them.
But to sit in darkness is difficult. To succumb to the cold, deafening silence of solitude, the misery of depression & confusion—to admit these terrors & to speak of them openly feels like a sick glorification. And there is no glory in darkness.
I sit in sunlight with abandon. I sit in darkness with shame.
When I am lightness, I am as weightless as a feather.
When I am darkness, I pierce infinite nothingness.
I do not want people to see my darkness. I do not want them to know the depths I’m capable of. But to deny that it exists within me feels like a gross disavowal of my truth. And my truth is this:
What I feel right now—& have been feeling for months—is a gnawing hunger, one that aches inside my belly as if it were ravenous & craving nourishment. It is a longing I cannot shake, an intense kind of desire to do, to feel, to experience. It is driving me mad. It is keeping me restless.
I have dreams that are wild, borderline nonsensical. I lust for things I have never experienced. I know what it is I want. I know what it looks like, what it smells like, & what it might feel like to have those experiences in my possession.
Some of these things I want are tangible, but many of them are as untouchable yet pervasive as air, & like air, I need these things to breathe; I need these experiences to live fully. Some of them are foolish. Some of them are ambiguous, so very difficult to pinpoint that if I were to try, it would be like asking me to swallow the sun. Some of them are superfluous. All of them, my desires, are important.
And as I desire, as I sit & allow the sweetness of my daydreams to permeate through me, I feel profound loneliness creep in. It does so stealthily, it does so without regard for the purity of my wants.
I feel profound loneliness because what I crave I do not think I can attain in this lifetime. I feel profound loneliness because my desires remind me of what I deserve to have, yet I do not. I feel profound loneliness because within my longing is the reality that I have been here before, aching for more, & aching because I am aching for more. I feel profound loneliness because I feel like I do not belong to this era.
From this loneliness, envy is provoked. And from envy, inferiority. And from inferiority, unworthiness. And from unworthiness, right back to desire, except this time it is desperate—for love, for acceptance, for attention, for inner peace.
This is where I am today.
This is my darkness.
I have been spending many of my days spinning with these two deities, Lightness & Darkness, & their peculiar paradox: the exhilaration of desire, the lilt of longing, paired with the depression of loneliness, the hopelessness of isolation.
I am equally familiar with both, but only proud of one.
In this moment, I am reconciling with the paradox of my lightness & my darkness—that which is deep, potent desire & impassable, all-consuming loneliness.
I show this side of me to you without shame or regret. I show this to you to proclaim my truth, to express the magnificence of my duplicity, & to embrace the darkness, for it is that which creates in me great depth.
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