Black (Heavy Sleep)

You turn off the light and close your eyes, preparing to drift to sleep. But the silence around you does not show mercy for your ears and so you hear the world spinning: a branch touches the closed window lightly, a night bird spreads her wings not that far away, the rustling of your feet under the covers, the nails scratching the skin of the left hand, the heart beating steadily inside the chest.

You hear everything.

And everything hears you.

So you open your eyes and darkness welcomes you with open arms. It's so dark, that you can't even see the stretched arms in front of you. You struggle to catch the glimpse of the illuminated window, but apparently an even darker hole opens in the place of the well known glass. And that darkness has black eyes that follow your every move.

You can't breathe as the darkness tightens its grip around your body. You feel your skull throbbing in a futile attempt of the brain to shake you awake or to dismiss the thought of blindness, the eyes moving from right to left, trying so hard to catch at least a sparkle of white in all that suffocating black.

And the suffocating feeling that you're shrinking in your own bed, the world you knew becoming thrice its size around you. You can't see - that's a fact. So you get up from your bed and you know that what you touch with your soles it's just the red carpet, but it's just a habit of what your eyes used to see every morning and evening. Then, on the right, your fingers hit something hard - the small desk where the phone lies. The gadget does not respond to the command and the screen does not show its light when pressed.

You're running blind...

In the darkness that follows, your fingers leave a invisible trail on the wall of the long and narrow corridor. You know where the switchers are, but you can't see their flickering leds, burning red in the darkness.

On.

Off.

On.

Off.

You hear the switcher, you can definitely feel the bulb's light falling on your cheek, but you can't see it. The darkness is just like a Black Hole, sucking you in more and more, till there's nothing left of your soul, till the warm body of yours remains just a shallow shell of warm flesh and red fluids.

Darkness - unimaginably solid and warm.

You can hear everything.

And everything can hear you.

You nails scratch the skin around the temple, the fingertips run on the skin under the eyes, pressing it towards the inside until you feel it giving in to the pressure. Your nails slip inside the small openings and curve upwards, pushing the eyeballs out of the orbits.

Yes, it hurts to feel the flesh severing the muscles, to feel the fibers of your body protesting against the stupidity of your act.

Yes, it hurts to feel the blood gushing out of the holes that remain behind, to feel the wind howling inside them as you hold on the two wet and sticky balls that used to grant you vision way back before.

Yes, it hurts - the darkness, the holes on your face, everything hurts!

But it hurts less to know that the permanent darkness is brought by permanent damages than being the same phobia haunting you over and over again...