Afraid of the Dark
What lurks beneath the surface of murky waters terrifies mankind. The ocean floor, in its vastness, overshadows the very land on which we proudly stand. Trenches become parks with benches for the fears crafted by the mind, leaving immeasurable margins of error that we’re not allowed to understand.
Fascination ferments with age, breeding curiosities we can only materialize with a neural spark that moves our fingers. Curiosity is camouflaged as hubris, tempting our every nerves to seek answers in places that do not welcome any questions. Exploration becomes the unsuspecting goal, when it is in fact a journey minced into seconds — delicious time spent with the devil, sins scattered in territories we can never record, but only remember. Experimentation fights armies of ignorance, leaving no stone unturned, sacrificing white flags of surrender to false impressions.
We only see as far as we know, and the thirst for the undefinable truth continues. Our footsteps become freeze-frame memories of our “been theres and done thats", making more roads on soils that do not belong to us. We only understand as far as we see, and the passion to learn about phenomena down to the atom ensues. Our fingerprints stain corridors, leaving signs of trespass in the night — here we find ourselves in the arms of the void, a not-so corporeal imaginary figment we tend to trust.
Prove me wrong when I say there is power in the thoughts we do not share. Our ideas and sentiments, our testimonies and criticisms, our secrets and promises — they’re all a strange kind of similar, almost like mirrors staring at each other’s infinities. There are no bets to make, nor any risks to dare. All we have left when we are stripped to the core is the ultimate truth we crave, a reality founded on the undeniable — the inescapable fear of our own “unknowns" that ring at horrifying frequencies.
Run as you may, but what hides underneath the skin so well taken care of is the macabre and grotesque. Black magic pales in comparison to their ability to outrun time itself, just an inch away from being omniscient. Perhaps we see God, or our untimely hour of death, or the split-second rewind that plays our lives on loop — you cannot run from this. We are as insignificant as we are an abnormal kind of transient.
We only exist until we do not, and so we claim our right to learn about what bothers us until the eventual collapse of the universe. We are remixed particles, and the divine recycling bin has no eyes that allow it to discriminate between good and evil nor right and wrong. It will not remember us, and we will not remember who we used to be before we sang our last verse. We are real until we become imaginary, a long lost obsolete story told to generations until our influence is no longer strong.
There’s nothing more bittersweet than the realization that our truths have no weight nor mass — an unfortunate kind of meaningless written in too many personal meanings.
Thus fate becomes the ally we cannot deny nor resist, a storyteller dressed in the flesh of a psychopomp. To it, we entrust our lives, hoping that it falls into a nitrogen human, causing short circuits celebrated with firework-like sparks.
Life is bliss, ignorance, and hope in its misconstrued abundance and eventual absence — the only way out is to live it with a happiness we won’t even remember in our lives after death.
Perhaps we are the curious, perhaps we are the wise, and perhaps we are pilgrims — but truthfully, we are simply as interested as we are afraid of the dark.
