I slept with the lights on

I slept with the lights on last night. Got back from seeing Sin City, talked with the girlfriend on the phone, and curled up in bed with House of Leaves and all the lights cranked.

Darkness, so much of it. Sliding past the car windows, eating the street lights until they turned black, and fading away into a afterglow of spilled ink that drifted with the highway as Eric took the corners way too fast. It crawled out between the one sixtieth of a second gaps in the film’s frames, ate the edges of my mind, and left the stain of its unengulfable stench on my soul.

It always has.

That sweet melody of night that whispers something lives here and you do not belong, still calls. I see it in the shadows on the ground and the gaps between the stars when I look up at the night sky. It’s a sour pit in my stomach and a rotten taste in my mouth. Life is filled with the edges of the world that light can’t touch.

Somehow I’ll walk through this. Maybe when she gets home.