The dark part in the corner of my room is waiting for me to look at it. It always does this as I begin to fall asleep, and every night I try not to look. We have played this game of cat and mouse for decades, maybe since I was a child and didn’t yet know why I was afraid of the dark. But I know now, and still it scares me. It will do such strange things as change shape, stretch, loom up suddenly, or move just barely enough that I can feel the air around me shift. If it can startle me enough, make me curious enough, then I’ll have to look at it.
And I don’t want to look at it anymore.
Now, as I lie here in bed, between the waking world and the sleeping one, I feel the dark corner of my room fidget listlessly, tired of how hard I’m working to avoid eye contact. In the back of my mind, I can feel more than hear a soft, lilting whisper as it calls my name in a hiss like steam from a kettle. It’s faint, but still sounds like an alarm bell inside me. I try to shut my eyes again, but they won’t stay closed for more than a minute or two. There’s no sleep inside them for me to curl up and nestle down into. There’s no comforting thoughts that listen to reason or logic.
There’s just nothing, except a heightened awareness of that thing with me in the room, that dark part. My shut eyes only make it all the louder, all the bigger. More inviting.
I am an old man now, but this thing feels far older than me. As if, perhaps, it has always existed.
Before I know it, my eyes are open again, intently finding some spot on the wall, some crack or deformity in the plaster that I can cling to. Anything to keep myself from looking. I hear it call me, more insistent now, the buzz of a mental mosquito threatening to land. Acknowledge me, it says, or get bit. But I know that if I don’t look, if I can stay strong until I fall asleep, then it can’t get me. Old age has made it difficult though, and sometimes I slip up.
I remember the last time I looked there, and what I saw. It’s no real thing, no real entity, but at the same time… it has a voice. A face. A strange, pitying, calculating smile. And it always comes to me as something I once trusted or loved, and have now let go of.
Once, it was a featureless baby, that reached up to me, only in a flash of mental colors and wishing, wanting, imagining what if. Then it was gone, as it always has been. You will never have that, my brain reminds me. You gave up on that long ago, that is not a life you can achieve. You’re alone now, and too old to remold yourself and find someone to share that with.
Once, out of the darkness, I saw a far off land, a path spiraling up into a green mountain with a red shingled temple at the top. I could feel a bell ringing there, even if it did not sound in my ears. The sun rose over the temple, and in the flash of light that jutted off one massive window, the scene became just a part of a memory I’ve never hard. Will never have. You could not climb those steps, I tell myself. You missed the chance to do so when you had young legs with lots to give. It’s too late to climb.
Still another time it was a kind, smiling face, with inviting soft lips, and with green eyes that shone with affection and light. But the eyes closed. They’ll never reopen. It was only emptiness in the corner, even from the start. It’s been so many years, decades, I remind myself. You already put all those photographs away in the attic.
But last time, I remember that there was a different face, one that lingered, and that its voice was clear in my thoughts. As if I’d watched the episodes just yesterday. I can almost feel the smile on my face as I laugh at her writing her daily letter to her mentor. I can taste the cereal, not yet stale with milk. I can think of the usernames of the friends I should message online later about this, real people whose names I never knew. Her mane flows in a breeze I can’t feel, her horn shines like the blade of a knife. And I can see, in her dark eyes, a reflection of myself, when I at least believed in some form of magic.
Those eyes, though, they aren’t the same as they used to be. Even though I only see them for a blink, a brief instant, I can see that they extend back, deep and pit like, that I could fall into and be lost in forever if I looked too long. There’s no light in them like there used to be, just flat, drawn purple rims and then holes that give way to an unfathomable darkness that goes down and down. She may be smiling, but that does nothing to make her feel more like she should. In fact, it only makes her seem more real and more haunting.
I remember I turned sharply away from the dark corner, but she was already there in my head. I’d absorbed her as an idea from just one brief look into the blackest part of my room, the mental static of looking into matte emptiness. I remember I shut my eyes, but she was there too, nestled inside me as sleep refused to do. And I heard her voice, so clearly, echoing off the inside of my skull.
“You were happy,” she says.
I know. That was a long time ago.
“Did you learn nothing from me?”
I tried to be happy, I swear to you, I tried to make friends. I tried to have faith in others, look on the bright side, problem solve, compromise. I tried to be kind, generous, honest, loyal, and full of laughter.
“You forgot the magic.”
There is no magic, I remember thinking. I believed it once, I did, but the closest thing I find to magic are ghost of things I cannot have, things I gave up on, things that I ran out of time for. They are ethereal to me, magic like a spell or a curse would be. Even the magic of love and life is fleeting, and fades quickly.
And then I remember the sound of my child voice, the one I’d had when I first met her, speaking out from some recess in my brain where I’d tried to lock it.
Are you disappointed in me?
“Yes,” she says. “You gave up.”
It happens when you get old. It happens the more life you live through, the more missed chances you have to keep track of.
“You are weak.”
There’s cruelty in her voice, the way there never was when I watched her on a screen. I can feel her anger in me, feel her trying to paw her way into my thoughts to show me all the things I could have had, if I’d just made different choices. It’s hard to tell how much of it is my own anger. Maybe all of it.
I am old, I think, and I can feel myself pleading. I am old and tired.
Her voice rises, she spreads her wings in my mind. Behind my shut eyelids, I can see her eyes glowing into me, seeing every remorse I have, every sorrow, every would have, should have. She’s drawing them out, just by appearing in my mind exactly the way I recall her when I was still new and hopeful.
“You are old,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean the world changed, or even that we, all of us in Equestria, changed. Didn’t you know that we last forever? We don’t age, the pictures on your screen don’t age or change with the years. The magic, the lessons and letters and diary entries have not gone away or been altered. Only you have.”
Please don’t be angry with me, my child voice pleads against my will. Please don’t be mad that I stopped being happy, and loving, and open to thoughts and feelings of magic. I don’t know how to go back anymore.
“How could you?” the voice hisses. It doesn’t even sound like her anymore. I can feel more darkness seeping in around the edges. “It’s too late. How could you let us down? We’re a part of you. We’ll always be a part of you, we helped shape what you eventually became. How could you forget everything we taught you about how to be happy, live, love, and laugh?”
I tried, I remember wailing in my mind, and I remember feeling real tears forming in my eyes as I pressed them shut, tighter and tighter. But inside me, there’s a lilac face, looming over me, making me feel inches, centimeters high. She looks regal, like some cold queen rather than a princess, and she looks at me like I am to be punished for my insolence. I feel myself teetering on the rims of those black, bottomless eyes.
“I want you to remember us,” she says.
Please don’t make me.
“I want you to remember how you used to feel when you watched us.”
Why? I used to love you, why do you want me to hurt for you?
“I want you to remember our messages, our simple lessons, and how easy we made the world seem.”
I was a child. I know better now. Please don’t make me remember what it was like before I knew, when I could pretend, and deny, and just enjoy my ignorance. Don’t make me want things I can’t have.
“You will suffer,” she says in a voice like a blade scraping across metal. “You will remember every moment of that, and know you will never get it back. That what you felt is gone, and that we have not changed. It’s gone because you let it go.”
I remember reaching up to clutch my head, press on it, as if I could press her away or cave in my own head with my wrinkled hands. I think she was laughing at my feeble attempts.
Get out!
"No. I am always here, just waiting for you to acknowledge me. I can no more leave than you can forget."
Please, tell me why you’re doing this! Tell me what you really are that you would come to me in these forms of ponies, children, loves. These shapes, these phantoms of my past decisions!
And I remember she smiled. And it was not the smile of a silly little animated pony, and not the smile of a friend ready to teach you friendship lessons. It was a human smile, one of knowing, pitying malice. It was my own, reflected once more out of that sweet pastel face. A smile I have not been able to manage for years.
“When you get to the point you’re at,” she says, and now her voice is sweet, but venomous. I can feel her fangs sinking in. “looking at darkness doesn’t just mean you see darkness. You see what could be in that darkness, just the possibilities. And what could have been in you. Those missed possibilities too.”
I remember a tautness in my mind, a tightness in my throat, as her words resounded, echoing down halls, wells, and caves in my thoughts.
I recognize you now. I know you.
“Everyone knows me. Who can honestly say that they regret nothing?”
I remember screaming in my own head, pounding at the walls of it, gritting my teeth to try to block her out with my own mental white noise. But she kept speaking, laughing, reminding me of moments when I’d had things, when I’d lost things. I tried not to hear her, but it took all of my effort to keep the fantasies out. Things could have been different. I was different. I changed. It’s my fault I’m here in bed now, with no one beside me and with no laughter and magic in my heart. I want to get those feelings back, and I just can’t. I can’t.
Eventually, I’d been so exhausted I’d fallen asleep with all my efforts. When I woke, my room was lighter, and the corner wasn’t so dark that I couldn’t see where it ended.
Now, I lie here, closing my eyes, opening them, struggling against my own inquisitiveness once more. I never know what I’ll see when I stare into the darkest corners. It could be her again, it could be the stairs to the temple, the kind face I still miss, or it could be something new. But I do know that there’s pain in that corner. There’s a thing, without a true form, that just wants me to remember, so that I will hurt. It wants me to spend my time and thoughts on what I’m missing and have missed.
It’s easy when you’re young to focus on what you do have, what good things there are in your life, in order to shut that shapeless creature out. And I try to do that now. Try to remember that I am alive, that I may be alive for some time yet. I have some decisions to make still, few though they may be, and that’s something to cling to. There is no reason to look, nothing good waits for me there. There is no sense in dreaming of sweet things, fantasies of what if. There’s no point in tracing my fingertips over faces that I have not touched in decades, or that I never touched at all. If I look, I will hear in my head the voice, telling me to remember. I should be strong.
But as she said, I am weak. I am alone. I am old. I am tired. And there is much that is now beyond my grasp. She is waiting for me there, an old friend, the element of magic, and something I have long since forsaken. Who am I to keep her waiting?
Before I can tell myself no, before I can find a mental distraction, and before I can quell the curiosity, I lose grip on my resolve. The darkness shudders. My eyes flicker.
And I look.
-End-
Author's Note
It just goes to show that happens when you can't sleep and choose to write instead.
Thank you for reading.
