(I wrote this on the plane a couple weeks ago, but never got around to posting it. I apologize for how roughdraft it is.)

He lights the match fast but it burns long enough for me to distinguish his key features. His emerald eyes, the distinct scar along his right cheek bone, his fear. In the light we tremble. The dark makes us narrators - story tellers of lives we know must be living - above us, below us, they must be, somewhere.

Another match and I raise bloody hands that I no longer recognize as my own to my face. I bite back my gasp and almost sigh relief when the light dies out. The matches will soon run out. But we no longer find them necessary or even useful. They are play things. Or simply distractions.

I relish the dark. It's the ones that let their eyes get used to the shadows - the ones that learn to see through the blackness - that doom themselves. There are the noises, sure; among many the tooth-cracking, fingernail-pulling, skin-scraping screams that dig at your deepest core until you have to lean against what you must assume is a wall and let the only thing left in you - stomach acid and blood darker than what you have been living in for what must now be months, force its way up your throat, working with your sobs, waiting for relief.

But the howls and pained cries of desperation are not the worst of it. Oh, no. The worst is the exaggerated silence. The too-quiet quiet where you listen for your own breathing, pulse quickening, not sure what belongs to you and what is owned by your pitch black environment. Your skin crawls or something in your skin crawls. Nothing is certain any longer. You can't remember what you look like - what you used to look like. You wonder if maybe it isn't all just phantom limb syndrome. But here you mustn't ever believe that you are only imagining this. You must always, always believe in everything you have always feared.