Don't Blink!

Total Dark

One can describe it as a blank daydream or as if everyone has gone blind. Its mysteriousness made it terrifying, haunting, as the sun disappears each day. It's not like the night because at least there would be moonlight. And no, it doesn't follow a timeline, it happens unexpectedly.

No one knows what it is or why it occurs. The only thing we're sure of is that each time it happens, the sun gets dimmer and dimmer.

It started when they claimed there was an object near the sun. "At one o'clock position, you can see it if you wear sunglasses."

People gave their own speculations, the government was controlling the weather, the clouds were being manipulated to filter the light of the sun and make layers to hide the object, and of course, the end of the world. But we couldn't do anything. We don't know anything.

I hate that I was clueless. More than I hate that they were probably hiding something from us. If it's really the end of the world, there must be something I could do. Or so I wish.

I often go to the mountains, the highest point of the city, with my telescope and watch the sky. I'd look at that thing near our sun, unmoving, unknown. Maybe it was aliens, I thought.

I remember when I was twelve, I would like to send them a message. Though, my father who gave me my telescope told me to make it as short as I could. Six words at most. Then:

Our sun is dying. Send help.

Scratch that.

Are you the one causing this?

From the mountains, the way it darkens seemed like rain clouds. It was the same every time. I watched how it covered the entire city, the entire world, until it was total darkness. Then it would go away.

You'd think we could use flashlights or artificial luminescents but all the light, I mean literally, even the ones we could make, fire, electricity, the light from phones or TVs, all of it was absorbed by the void-like darkness.

There's another theory that the sky isn't real, that it was just a super huge screen. An artificial one that shows the sun, stars, clouds, and it's only getting rusty.

But the sun never reached its peak again. It started getting colder and colder and the days shorter and shorter. Because the duration of the total darkness was getting longer and longer. Days, even weeks.

We still don't know anything about it. But we now knew for sure that someone or something was sucking the life out of our sun. Yet still, none of us could do anything.

It was catastrophe after catastrophe. Man-operated infrastructures like power plants began to malfunction as the workers reported they couldn't see anything.

During this temporary blindness, I think everyone just does whatever they can do. Because a human adapts to a situation and a human loses its mind after doing nothing for seventy-two hours.

As for me, I sleep, most of the time. It's easier. Not to sleep but to wait. Until it passed, until we could see light again.

Inevitably, crimes shot up. Although the government made some drastic measures, people began to live their days as if it were their last. The law had become as if another conspiracy fighting for its existence.

The constant ignorance and the anxiety of our impending doom never left our backs. It festered like a cureless disease, enough to drive anyone mad and strike panic amongst the weak.

Most were eaten by hopelessness, powerlessness, emptiness. Nonetheless, people believed more in those now because no one could provide answers.

By those, I mean flat earthers spreading like moss and prompting their own beliefs. As well as people who kept saying "It's the rupture, repent for your sins, our savior is here." No one ever came.

It amuses me how the darkness is like our blindness from the truth. How we were held captive by our own ignorance, pushing us to an edge until we only know one thing, that we don't know anything.

They say it was bliss, ignorance per se, but what good is bliss if there's a bigger price to pay? To lose everything, without knowing why.

Besides, humans weren't designed for ignorance as well and we aren't designed for a lightless world because we have eyes. We always give interpretation to the world around us. We try to process everything, make meaning out of nothing. Even now in this darkness. So there should be something we could do.

We could try to remember, imagine, or at most wait. We could all wait. Until the greetings of dawn, the goodbyes of sunset, and everything in between would just turn into a memory. We could only wait until the world meets its end. Maybe, for all of us too.