Torchlight

The darkness hides secrets, but sometimes, it also holds a small measure of comfort. 

The power goes out on Friday night, plunging the city into total darkness. It’s large shadow, seemingly cast by the footprints of a giant, overwhelming, and only eclipsed by the pale ring of the moon. 

(Sickly, ill light standing alone against the void; a single person standing tall, defying judgement before wrathful armies. There’s something fascinating about that that holds your attention, makes you breathless.)

There’s barely a whisper of warning beforehand. It’s sudden and abrupt. You have come to dislike surprises. It startles you, digging deep fear into the depths of your chest, raking it’s long claws into your spine and yanking out all the breath in your lungs. 

You hate it (cruel, vicious white-hot mangled rage), because life is a lottery. It’s where luck is breath, and everything and anything can fall apart with the slightest push.

(You’ve played the game. You lost. 

Suck it up, deal with it.)

You’re standing in the kitchen when it happens. You hesitate, eyes shutting close for barely a second, but time is slippery, and when you open them again, there is no light to enter anymore. You can feel your heart falter, skip, before quickening. Rat-tat-tat, the sound goes, again and again. It’s in your ears; angry, white static soundwaves. 

The rush in your veins leaves you drained, out of breath.

(But you adjust quickly. You always do.)

You look around, and think that if the stove wasn’t on, a part of you might have broken off further in that moment. Perhaps it already has, but you wouldn’t know because you can‘t tell anything apart anymore. 

(Heads or tails, up or down, and around and around we go)

The flames are weak, barely there. It flutters in the stale air of the apartment, boxed in by the four small walls and suffocated by the lack of motion. There’s nothing for it to eat. It cannot devour, tampered by your actions and the limitations of its design. 

The luminescent blue light reflects in your face, refracted into shards of fractured glass in the thin, watery film of your eyes. It shouldn’t be warm, so small and fragile a thing that it is, but there’s sweat rolling down the sides of your face anyway. At least, you think it’s sweat; it could be tears, you don’t know anymore. 

(You breath too fast and too slow. You don’t take in air. Your head aches, and you long to crack, so that the gut-wrenching, sweat-percolating thing living in you will spill out. 

But you also know that, if you crack, you will never be whole again. All the king’s cavalry can’t help you. You want to, regardless, because you feel too full and bursting, pressure shoving against your insides.)

Your hand rests on the knob. The egg is half-fried inside in a sticky, liquidy burnt spread, the insides of the yolk flayed wide open, and you realise that you have hesitated too long. You shut it off, quickly, chest rising and falling more rapidly.

This time, the darkness swallows you whole. 

(You wear it like a cloak, a mask to hide your face behind.)

Your feet move without pause, and it’s guided only by a slow thrumming in your veins. Something at the back of your skull catches on fire, and you move dizzily through the shadows, a spectre.

(You should feel right at home. You’re don’t.)

You ache all over, stumbling like a dead, shambling corpse as you shuffle to the living room. You can’t see a thing, but everything feels amplified and you are hyperaware of your surroundings in a way that you have never been before. You can’t see, but that doesn’t stop you from attempting to find the power box. It’s tucked away in the storage room, and you step into that pocket of space.

It takes a moment to realise what’s wrong. The night skyline of the city has been erased from the narrow strip of window at the top. There should have been small lights in the distance, little ants marching through a parade on the blank expanse of the inky strip of sea. You crouch, pull out a stool and put your weight on it, hoping that it doesn’t buckle under your weight. It strains, but doesn’t break.

You look closely and realise, that it’s not all emptiness. There is the moon above, and it is a constant that you gladly sink into. You are grateful for it, but the price you pay is that you nearly miss the sights below. The lights on all the buildings are gone, but there is still activity in the streets. 

The red headlights of cars steep the city in a red, glaring haze, making the world appear almost as a blood-red mist in the settling in of proper midnight. The noises are more muffled, subdued, but it is still there. You peer closer, squinting your eyes until they begin to burn, but it is worth it when you finally understand.

Faint beams of light cut through the air. The people are the sea in its stead, and it’s just waves and waves of fresh crowds as they begin to stream out of individual houses and shops, stores and buildings and apartments and Walmart, and become a moving surge of bobbing heads and tightly packed droplets in a large body of water. Cloistering together, hand in hand, arm in arm and pressed coats against each other, the world doesn’t seize its rhythm, but moves as a greater, fused being.

(The only thing missing, you think, is the rain.)

Something like longing catches you in the chest. It’s sharp and leaves an ashen taste at the back of your mouth, but the blow is softened and dulled by the sentiment that you have witnessed.

(It’s their song, you think, but not yours. 

Does it matter? It drowns you out, after all. You learn to adapt it as your own.)

You breathe quietly. It’s a puff of air in the otherwise silent room, and it’s the final nudge that send you careening over the edge. 

(You’re standing in a grave, deathly silent, unmoving. 

You need to escape.)

Your hands fumble along the shelves, dust and grime collecting at the fingertips. You grimace but resolutely keep going, until you find what you are looking for. 

With the flashlight in your hand, you flee, feet thudding on the ground as you take a flying leap through the last steps of the stairs in the shared stairwell. The impact leaves the nerves there shuddering with adrenaline, and it drinks up the blood in your veins.

You step outside and inhale a lungful of the night air. The darkness stirs in your limbs, in your chest and every breath you take. Glimpses of snapshots into the lives of other people pass by you, moving tableaus of animated figures and embraces captured underneath the darkened strip of sky and land. 

People keep going, even as the world falters. 

It’s heartbreakingly beautiful, you think, and melt into the crowd, just one person among thousands.