A Collection of Portraits

ρяσℓσgυє: υи¢єятαιиту

ρяσℓσgυє: υи¢єятαιиту

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"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

Jack Kerouac, On The Road

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It breaks my heart to know that you'll actually read these words tomorrow. You certainly don't deserve to be dealt such an unexpected blow, but you do deserve a proper explanation, so I hope that this letter can at least provide more clarity than my aimless ramblings ever could. I'm going to leave it in a place where I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding it, and I hope that you'll read it all the way through, even if it seems too painful at times.

I have to start by asking you to forgive me for writing a letter just because I couldn't find my voice. I won't blame you if you want to call me a coward, if you think I deserve to be punished instead of forgiven. I'll still be repeating it inside my head, hoping you can somehow hear me:

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry it had to happen this way.

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As a child, he'd never been afraid of the dark.

It had been his only weird thing, really... the only thing that set him apart from ninety percent of the other kids in his neighbourhood or at school. Children weren't supposed to enjoy wandering into closets at midnight, pushing aside the shoes and falling asleep behind thick curtains of musty tweed and gore-tex. Children loved the sunshine, and closets contained monsters, and night-lights were made for a reason. This was all according to his mother, who, after so many months of failing to drag a suitable answer out of her little boy, decided to (of course) find a therapist off whom she could bounce a barrage of ridiculous questions: Is this healthy? Is it... you know... detrimental to his posture if he sleeps on the floor under his bed? Is he going to grow up to be one of those people who can't go outside or be in public? Is it possible to suffocate inside a dryer?

And the answers followed like equally spaced speed bumps on a long, level, otherwise empty road: Yes. No. Probably not. Only if the door is shut (and, pre-emptively, with raised hands: You can't from the inside).

After one thoroughly enlightening hour it was determined that okay, sure it was a little odd.

It was odd that Evan Halliday didn't just endure the darkness with a determined bravery that most kids his age exhibited. He actually liked it, sought it out, found solace in it, and this was an "unconventional behaviour" according to... science.

Still, there wasn't much to be done. Susan Halliday proceeded to painfully (and somewhat guiltily) part ways with her hundred and fifty dollar check, and Evan continued to wake up cramped between the clothes-hamper and the closet-organizer until his limbs eventually became too long to keep folded up all night without succumbing to pins and needles.

Yet, even after his hide and seek phase, as it came to be known, had passed, the strange behaviour would continue to reveal itself from time to time. In middle school he rolled his eyes at his friends and their fascination with ghost stories and Ouija boards and Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, their squeals of terror always punctuated by his poorly-held-back grunts of inappropriate laughter. They would, in turn, try their hardest to get a rise out of him, jumping out from behind the furniture, forcing him to sit through horror movie upon horror movie, solemnly warning him about things that supposedly thrived in the darkness: ghosts and monsters in all their various forms. But he couldn't even force himself to convincingly bat an eyelash. It was all just so silly; he knew the dark, had seen every last corner of it, and it seemed to him that he was the only thing that thrived there. If all of it were true, if there really was a legitimate reason to be afraid, he'd have discovered it a long time ago.