Dark Conversation

Awake in the middle of the night. Awakened for some unknown reason. It’s dark and foggy. Street lamps glowing and the trees and fences and houses fading, ghostly, into the dark. What’s on your mind?

Something keeps me up. No matter what I think or dwell on, my heart keeps pounding it’s steady beat and will not slow down. Think plants, think plans. Think friends and muse on the world. Remember the future and ponder the past. Nothing slows my mind. Nothing makes any difference. I wonder what wakes me up.

Being awake so early, or is it late? Is it too late for bed or too early to get up? My eyes water and blur these words, but I am pressed to continue on. I want to lie down, but sleep will not come. I cannot relax to the point of sleep. There was someone here.

Was someone here? I think so. An essence. They who are lonely and sad in their sleep. looking for some solace, some assurance that they will not always be alone. I wonder why they have put themselves in that position. What was it about their lives that made them choose to be separate? To find comfort in things and doings rather than people. I know that feeling, and how the promise rings empty with time. That achievement without connection is no comfort. The doings become empty acts that once held meaning but now just fill the time. Once they brought joy, but that joy was founded in the sense that the doing made me part of something. To be recognized, admired perhaps. But in the utter finality of night, I was alone. Even if there was someone there, I was alone.

“Come,” I say to the essence, “let me give you a hug. There is no need to be alone, you are loved and cared for.” In the dark vastness of my mind, we are together, for a little while. I offer what I can, though I cannot be sure the essence understands or is even aware. It’s gaze turned resolutely inward.

The insecurity of the beautiful. Are they only liked because they are beautiful? Is to pretend, to play the part, the price for companionship? Do they ever have a chance to be anything else? Perhaps there is some relief in getting old. Perfection is gone. No longer required to measure up to etherial standards, they can be themselves. And what of those relationships built on shallow beauty? Must they be severed, or can they accept the reality underneath? The fickle move on. There is always a newer, fresher, willing applicant, eager to trade appearance for substance.

It’s hard to make the switch. It’s so easy to let the world come to you. To be you in the face of what the world expects, that is a true test of character. To hold to my course as the winds of society and undercurrents of my own values seek to undermine my wish for change. I am betrayed every day by my own thoughts, whispering quietly, insidiously, almost outside awareness, to go back to the expected, return to the safe, to slide back into that well-worn groove of the expected, the normal. No talking to entities in the night, no affairs in the either. Keep my mind in lockstep with the material.

I am required to write in the dark, when the gate keepers are dozing in their huts. Ideas and thoughts can slip out, between the bars. The doors of perception are left ajar and unguarded, who knows what might slip in, or out? I start writing in the dark, now the sky is gray, how time passes. Ideas that flow in the dark, now want rigor, and that is just no fun.