The Gift of Illumination

My feet lift off the ground at the sidewalk’s curb, but it is a matter of mindless movement, not awareness. I am a tangle of thoughts and emotions that I cannot seem to make sense of, blurred with ambiguity till neither element can be truly identified. Their struggle resides in me, in the scopeless expanse of my mind, in the tight knot of my stomach. I clench my fists as another influx of thoughts hits me, leaving me weighed down by the feeling of hopelessness. All the best knives, no hope. Why? Why is life so cruel?

I am across the street now, safely on the sidewalk. The query dies in my head with the flood of adrenaline; the insecurity fades away like pixie dust and is replaced with a heightened perception.

There’s something about the night, something that consumes rational meaning. All that turmoil…it is suddenly masked. Masked with this darkness that is somehow so alive and alluring and healing, like aloe on a burn.

The cold brings a stinging sensation to my bare skin as my pulse and heart pound to the same wild rhythms. There are few cars on the road—the night could swallow me up and no one would be here to notice. I become my surroundings despite my locomotion—the black sky, the layered shadows on the sidewalk, the streetlamps. Streetlamps. Under each streetlamp, my vision becomes a blazing glow that fades in and out as my feet carry  me on.

The light comes and goes. Einstein said that because cold is only the absence of heat, darkness must be nothing but the absence of light. He was right. The city below glitters like jewels in the distance. And so I find my real savior to be light, because I wouldn’t be able to run free like this is in total darkness.