Embracing the Darkness

And I'd give up forever to touch you
'cause I know that you feel me somehow.
You're the closest to heaven that I'll ever be
and I don't want to go home right now.

— The Goo Goo Dolls

Recently, I've been talking about a/the/my darkness but I've never really wrote about what it is. Let's do that now.

Darkness is like how one would feel having a father who was one of the good guys and having to grow up with stories of why people think of and remember him that way. It's an honour to be the son of such a man but him dying just before I turned two, I couldn't really say anything when people ask me what I remember about him except, “I gave him White Rabbit when he was sick.” The man, the legend— it's all stories to me. Yet I had always been expected to try to be like him, in some way, but nobody taught me how. And I feel inadequate, as if I were a failure.

Darkness is like being in a twelve year relationship where you were genuinely happy only for 384 Thursdays; because you had to spend four years apart. The remainder of the time, you had to spend secretly meeting because your girlfriend's parents hated you for “having no dreams and aspirations”. All of that bullshit, I recently found out, actually meant having no car, no plans to get my own house, and no job. And while I've always said that I believed in using public transportation— no matter how absurd that sounds—; that I do have a home; and that I do work, although not in an office like the rest of the world; it didn't really matter to them. And I felt vile, irresponsible, rebellious, dirty, poor— although, I find nothing wrong with that—, unfit, and undeserving of their daughter's love.

Darkness is like thinking that I had friends who knew me as an adult, innocent of my mistakes when I was young. But the first bad story they heard about me, they flipped and became my judges. They say that I am bad for their friend because I don't go to her dance performances but they never did ask whether she went to my own shows. They say that I am a lazy bastard because I don't get myself a car and drive their friend around but they never did ask how much she wanted to drive herself but wouldn't get herself her own car— because, even at 40, her parents still won't let her do that. They say that I am a disrespectful idiot who initially broke up with their friend through Facebook Messenger but they never did ask what other means we had for communication— they didn't know that I can't call or go to their house because her parents hate me; they didn't know that she'd only see me on Thursdays, regardless of circumstances. They didn't care to know that their friend wouldn't come to my mother's birthday or any other similar occasion because “her family is not like that.” They didn't care to know that my mother loved her very much. And I feel dejected, angry, and betrayed because I am hated so much more than I deserve because of the stories that they share.

Darkness is like having people around you in the office, reading your shit, and chatting out loud about what you write when you know that you can hear them. It's like asking you to contribute to their blog and sit on your contribution for weeks only to post it on April Fool's Day because you may have slipped a few things in it that they could have easily taken out. It's like, every time you are in the same space, they make you feel as if you've done something wrong, something that merits retribution, something... And I feel ostracised, that I don't belong in the place that I have to go to four times a week to make a living, that I will always be wrong no matter what I say or do or give, that I am a lesser person.

Of course, it's easy to say that none of those feelings are legitimate unless I legitimise them. I always try not to. But I a not my father. I am not one of the good guys who seem to have normal human powers. I am nobody's boyfriend and I have no support; and I will always have to reach deep within myself for strength. Always.

And it's exhausting.

But, like I've said before, I've grown to love the darkness after having to spend so much time in it. I am my darkness. And I'm tired of fighting it— I'm tired of fighting myself. It hasn't led me astray even after I began embracing it and it will not lead me astray now. I'm tired of dreaming about the good things, and about monsters.

Maybe they were right. I can't aspire. I can't be Icarus because I know that if I go for the Sun, my wings will melt. And I will fall. And die.