Potato Nose
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🕑 Added 2018-08-23 09:42:58 +0000 UTC
In the dead of night, you hear things you don't by day. Part of it is the lack of light; you notice more of what your ears are telling you when there's nothing visual to distract you.
Part of it is that caveman that lets within us, the lizard hind brain, call it whatever you like. The part that knows there are night time hunters out there. The part of our instincts that tells us that we're weak, edible, and vulnerable. The inner child fears the dark, and even the adult in is is nervous. I was twenty eight before I could walk in the dark in my own house without the crawling, tingling sensation in my ankles every time I passed by furniture I couldn't see under.
It's a strange thing to admit, that irrational fear. You aren't supposed to admit you're afraid, right? You're supposed to be unflappable, cool, and collected. But an integral part of being a writer is the brutal honesty that comes of genuine introspection, the baring of the soul that makes the motives real. The analysis bereft of judgment of our own insanities.
I was afraid of the dark for long and long after I should have outgrown it. It never stopped me from doing what I knew I should but it always lurked there in the cobwebby corners of my psyche, in the places I looked away from. The things that hide in the dark, unseen, these are the things that we fear, the unknown, the unknowable, the never conceived of. That which is only barely seen or not seen at all, this is what Sparks out sense of danger. The thing that might be is more frightening than the bear that we see clearly. Horror movies have played on this faces of human psychology for as long as the genre has existed.
Yet sometimes I wonder, is my lack of fear now a good thing? Is it a symptom of maturity, or instead a symptom that I've forgotten imagination, forgotten to question the world around me, settled into trusting too much that what was yesterday will remain the same tomorrow? Standing next to my bed, I look away from the darkness under it so that I only see it out of the corner of my eye, and I feel no fear. Yet the idea that complacency has settled into my assumptions is what really scares me.
Comments
Marcel
Heh. I'm 46 and there are still moments when I fear the dark... I usually manage to overcome those because I have a duty to my family. Otherwise I'd crawl under the cover and wait for the morning :)
