Darkness is the Absence of Light

Darkness seeps in the cracks, like the ceramics class you promised yourself you would take, tried once, and left to go do other, more imporant, things.

I stare into my computer screen and flip my pillow over to the cold side. There's no happiness in this life except what makes our dopamine receptors go forward towards the light. The dark side is a cracked coffee pot, or is it the lack of caffeine that keeps us addicted?

In this world, my mother said nothing is certain except death, love, and taxes. If cigarettes make your lungs turn black, does their sex appeal count towards love, or death?

Darkness doesn't creep in, it attacks you like a Picasso painting. It gets absorbed by your synapses in more mundane moments, like taking out the trash or doing the dishes. The analog clocks that we have all shunned in favor of iPhones have hands that grab. Toddlers run around screaming, and their sticky touch brings us back to childhood, or why else do people have children? They will grow up and shun us, and we will have lived to provide for what bites our hands.

We live in between the moments of realization that we are finite beings on a finite planet. Time is watching from across the room, and it doesn't like you. It wants you to hurry up and reproduce. We absorb time's gaze and accept the chores, the duties, the endless refrains of society. We are passionate to find what lights us up outside of our daily lives.

Darkness is perhaps inside black holes, where reality crouches. We are waiting for the light to suck us in, but until then, we must get dressed, brush our teeth, and live.