The darkness within

There is a place in my soul where the light never touches. It's dark and chaotic. There is fog there that lingers and settles at the bottom. I like to think the dark sits by my tailbone, waiting to creep up. I operate from this dark place sometimes. It feels less like me and more like someone else running my body. I am rugged and ruthless, sad and broken. I am my own abuser. I lead with the worst of me when this dark place becomes my beaconing center. I feel death and loneliness like we have always been best friends, holding hands and skipping through this life as one. It's dark here in this part of my soul and I drown in it, overcome with nothing but angst. My life becomes someone else's to live and I want so bad to not be a part of it any longer. I wish to melt into the darkness and let it take me. The other part of my soul lives here in this body of mine too, the light part. It barges in with flashlights on ready to take away the dark, ready to be a shining beacon of hope. It sits in my chest and resides there. Its a savior full of perseverance and optimism for the fate of the future me. It's unwilling to let the dark succumb, unwilling to give up. I'm terrified for the day that it does. The day where the light in me dies, the flashlights are turned off and there is no more saving. What will I become when there is no light left in me? When there's no more saving my soul that I can muster? I get close to seeing the lights turned off, the batteries are dying and the flashlights must be shaken to turn back on. Flickering, flickering. I get close to wanting it all to end. I stand at the edge of my darkness and think about diving in. There is always a piece of me though, the light within me that refuses to burn out, to fade. This is what I fight for who I fight for, I beg for the light in the middle of my own personal darkness. I pray that there will always be the piece of me that thinks I am worth saving, the piece that has the light turned on. I pray that I always believe that I am worth more than my darkness. I pray that there is always a glimmer of light left to fight. I find both terror and contentment in knowing there is no light here, without the darkness. -MDL.