Darkness

When the light is switched off and the candle is snuffed, blackness pours itself around you like melancholic bile. You feel depressed, as if the dark is a blank canvas on which all your worry and inadequacy makes itself known. The dark is awful and unclean, even if you are not a nychtophobe.

While you sit in solitary silence, totally devoid of light, the dark sets its malevolent hands upon you. Black velvet gloves that reach reach out to your throat. Velvet gloved fingers disturb your hair and snatch at your clothes. What makes it worse is the knowledge that these gloves do not exist. They are simply illusions vomited by your frightened imagination. Therefore, they cannot be faught against.

When the gloved hands of darkness compress your throat further, you know you cannot stand the ordeal any longer. You snatch up your lighter and, with trembling hands, flick the switch to light the candle. A tiny, indistinct blue orb glows firstly, emitting very little light. The flame soon, however, expands into a yellow steeple of light streaked with red and blue, supported by the scaffold of the wick.

You take the tiny light and sit with it before a mirror. The yellow steeple gives off heat that makes your chin and upper lip perspire. Its limited light is insufficient for you to make out the colour of your own hair and eyes. However, it easily picks out every line and blemish in your face, a blackened tooth, the silvery hairs sprouting between your eyebrows, the tiny craters of open pores and the glittering white flakes of dead skin on your chapped lips.

You again lift the tiny bell of the snuffer and extinguish the flame. A tendril of grey smoke billows from the wick carrying the special scent of molten wax to your nose. Sitting there, the black velvet gloves now stroking your face tenderly, smoothing out your wrinkles and hiding your blemishes away from judgemental eyes, you reason that no light at all is better than partial light. It's all or nothing.