A Dark Side

Darkness

I'm operating on very little sleep.
I'd estimate around two hours from last night as I finally found slumber long after midnight and was awakened shortly after 4:00am to the howling wind, the sound of smashing and complete and utter darkness.
I'm afraid of thunder.
I'm afraid of the dark.

I sit up straight in bed gasping for breath. From a restless sleep to adrenaline fuelled terror.

Again and again.

The last few nights have been rather trying.
My heart rate elevates as the sun sets, my fingers fidget, I braid and unbraid my hair and reach for a drink that is not there.

As I drift off, I forget how to breathe and startle awake, over and over and over.

When I finally sleep, I experience paralysis. For me it is not terrifying, there is no devil or demon sucking the life from me; there are shadowy presences, there is the grinding of teeth, there is the half dreaming of trying to slap myself across the face to wake me up. There is the ability to look, to see and to feel what is around me, but the panic at being paralysed. And then there is the dreaming of food - endless amounts and the guilt associated with this gluttony. A nice little call back to the anorexic days. I spent a lot of my sleeping life trying to fill the echo of that old hunger.

After I wake and eventually catch my breath, I am embarrassingly relieved that I have not eaten.

Lately, the heat has stifled me, leaving me sweating and tangled in my thin sheet.  Lately the paralysis is a nightly occurrence. Lately I wake up terrified and calling out and last night I woke up shrouded in black.

'I am blind?'
'... It's a storm, you idiot'

I turn to my phone; my crutch, my blue lit saviour and learn that Carrie Fisher has died from the cardiac arrest that befell her on Christmas Eve.
I start to cry.
I cry more today than I have in six months.
How fitting that she is taken on this darkest of days.
I can't stop wondering;
Did she know she was dying?
Was she scared?
Did it hurt?
When it was apparent that she wouldn't wake, did they take her dog to her?
How could a woman who was so bold and so bright be snuffed out - just like that?

I curse my naivety - because I have seen the bold and the bright extinguished before - people I knew and held and loved. I tiptoe around the very dark absence of a thought that I will see it again soon.

I spend the day processing the loss of this stranger who sits on my shelves, my shirts, my bags and in my heart - immortalised - as the very first princess I identified with. Her long dark hair and dark eyes; 'that could be me' my six year old self thought in wonder. She did not look like Peaches and Cream Barbie with a plastic smile and stick skinny body. She looked brave, beautiful and brilliant.

I also grapple with the idea of going home to darkness - like the last time it happened.

It was over two days with no electricity courtesy of another summer storm and it revealed my repressed fear of the dark.
'Please don't go...' I begged him.
'Please come back before it gets dark...' I compromised.
Of course he did not and I paced that huge pitch black house with shuddering breaths. Counting in through the nose and out through the mouth, trying to call him only every ten minutes so that I didn't look crazy.
I walked from corner to corner to soak up the last of the waning light.
'I wasn't that late!' He snapped - as if he was doing me a favour.

There was a monster in the darkness then. An unspoken secret whisper.

There is a monster in the darkness now. A black swelling mass that I push down and down; a threat, a promise, a reality.

Further into the darkness.

Today I can cry, but please let me be bright and bold and brilliant - like her.