You Know This House (and Yet...)

“Well, what is it like?”

It’s like walking through your house in complete darkness. You’ve lived in this house your whole life; you know exactly which barstool is never entirely pushed in. You know exactly when you need to shift your hips slightly to the right to avoid the surprisingly sharp corner of the awkwardly-placed table at the end of the hallway. You know exactly how many steps you’ll take until you step on the hollow tile in the middle of the hallway, and exactly how many steps after that you’ll take before making a sharp left. You know exactly when to stop trailing your hand along the wall so as to avoid breaking your fingers on the edge of the doorjamb. You know this house like the back of your hand. A comfortable confidence settles over you as you realize all this, and you feel certain that you can safely navigate through the darkness.

You take the first step. You don’t run into anything. You take another, and another, until you are walking at an almost normal pace. You exaggerate your movements and give the table a wide berth, compensating for any slight miscalculations you may have made. The subtle change in the way the still air sounds is an indicator that you’ve reached the hallway. You reach out a hand to touch the wall as confirmation. As you do so, there is a slight twinge of fear that you’re wrong, you haven’t reached the hallway, and you’ll grasp nothing but empty air. But the split-second fear fades immediately as your fingers graze the familiar, smooth walls of the hallway. Confidence restored, you stride forward. You take three steps, preparing to step on the hollow tile with the fourth step. You take the fourth step and hear the faint but satisfying thump that the tile always emits. You turn the corner and take five more steps. You should be at the door to your room. You reach for the door handle and are left grasping nothing but empty air, groping around in the darkness for something that is simply not there.

The fear returns. A nervous chuckle bubbles out of your mouth as you take another step, thinking perhaps you miscounted. (You didn’t.) Stretching both arms out in front of you and blindly feeling for the door, icy fear starts to crawl up your chest. The nervous butterflies fluttering harmlessly in your belly only moments ago morph into ravenous crows that peck incessantly at your organs, frantically trying to free themselves from their fleshy cage. Your stride shortens until you’re barely shuffling forward, and the sound of your bare feet scraping the tile shatters the almost reverent silence of the dark. You’ve covered several more feet. Surely you should have reached your room by now. You’re obviously not where you thought you were. (Then where are you?) You turn to the left, feeling for the light switch that should be there. (It isn’t.) Panic digs his nails into your skin as he grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you like a rag doll, plucking every last shred of certainty from your mind as one plucks a weed from the pavement. Just find the light, find the light, find the light and everything will be fine. You don’t find it. Hopelessness comforts you in your desolation like an old friend, wraps his arms around you, and refuses to let you go. “It’s safe here,” he croons, caressing your tear-stained cheeks with frigid fingers. “I’m your friend. I’m all you’ve got. Just stay here with me.”

“What is it like,” you ask? It’s wandering through the dark alone, terrified, and devoid of hope. It’s the ocean of sorrow that’s barely contained beneath your skin, begging you to release it, threatening to spill out of you or drag you into its depths. It’s constant, it’s ever-present, it’s incessant, it’s unyielding, it’s relentless, it’s inescapable. It’s plodding aimlessly around in the dark, your weary and bruised hands desperately searching for a way out that doesn’t exist. It’s the anguish that tears into your flesh and makes its home beneath your skin, burrowing deeper and deeper until you can’t remember what it felt like when it wasn’t there. It’s the breathlessness that accompanies the crippling despair; it’s the pathetic and ragged sounds of your breathing as your demons sit on your lungs and force the air from your body. It’s the anguished cries that rip free from your throat and push their way past your clenched teeth only to fall on deaf ears. It’s crying out for help with your last breath as your eyes grow heavier and heavier and you fail to convince them that they can stay open a little longer. It’s laying curled up on the floor for what feels like centuries—bruised, broken, weary, finished—and then hearing someone say thoughtlessly, “Dude, stop being so dramatic. Just turn on the light.”