I have been away,  under the skin of darkness.  I intended to bring along pen and paper, do a bit of blood-letting, record my thoughts; instead, I brought a bottle, numbed out and dreamed of becoming  someone else.  I curled up against the edges of my eyes and saw things I knew were lies, but I didn’t care.  I forgot about plotting my escape and let the stillness eat me up.

I relish in the motion of disappearance, crave it, seek it out like sustenance.  I have been this way for as long as I can remember.  I retreat with big plans, ideas of productivity, but who is to say that sinking into darkness is wholly unproductive?  I learn from the dark, discover things beneath it that give a rhythm of truth to my pulse.  Disappearing into darkness is a luxury, a gift I  have been afforded by blindness and the sting of ailments that have trailed across my heart.  In darkness I see the meaning of loss, and so the meaning of love.

Each time I retreat, my hope is  to re-emerge with a sense of renewal, a feeling of having reattached all that had come loose under the glare of the lights.  I know this is impossible, perhaps unnecessary.  It is the broken pieces that make me whole. In the act of sinking, I find ways to escape who I feel I am meant to be, and look more closely at who I really am.  And then I shed her.  I leave the noise of her behind and become the silence.

At once, I escape the confines of my mind and face the construct of deceit that plagues me.  Is it true then, that I am the deceit?  Is is true that I am the darkness?  Am I actually who I am and who I think I am meant to be?  Does it matter?  Probably not.  The darkness is just a place I like to retreat into, a place that has become warm and less frightening than the light.  I wish I was deeper, that I could come back and say I had discovered something profound, or at least had a profound thought.  The truth is,  every time I disappear, the only thing I really find is that I am indeed just human.