In This Dark Place

In This Dark Place
by Robert Aquino Dollesin

I am afraid of the dark.

They do not allow me to have the blue-eyed teddy bear my mother gave me last Christmas. In this dark place, there are no shelves hugging the walls. No books. No Curious George, Madelaine, or Dr. Seuss to help me to escape the blackness.

Once I asked for crayons, paper.

Those aren't permitted, either.

All you have here is darkness. And I am afraid of the dark.

The only light I see comes twice a day, the sweeping cone of a guard's flashlight.

I can, however, slip away through my imagination, swallow whole the cold and the solitude and the darkness.

I lie naked on my back on the hard floor. I picture snow falling, slanting down from a murky sky. Inevitably, time stops and my body grows numb from the cold.

The darkness drops away and . . .

. . . streaks of colors cartwheel through me. A glowing train glides across the surface of my palm. With time slowed, I can stretch and lean. Soaked in the light, travel through a bright-dusted lane.

I share my world with blue flames that people dance inside of. Faces of insects squeezing through peepholes. Lit farmhouses zipping past either side of me.

The new light shines through rattling leaves, pulsing, lancing, flickering. Red embers dripping off its edges. It pours through windows, seeps like sap from the barks of trees, rakes the dark city streets. It rises from grates on the sidewalk to flare up, flood, and strike.

A light that is always brilliant. Never mute, scant, faint. Never setting, fading, pulling away.

Here, in this dark place, even without my blue-eyed teddy bear and my books and my crayons, I have learned how to escape the frightening darkness by swallowing it whole, swelling around it, and taking it inside me . . .

. . . allowing it to become me.