A Familiar Kind of Darkness
By Lenora Wolfhart
Naya's POV
Before I met the darkness that carried me, I thought darkness only existed to consume.
At least, that's what everyone had always told me.
Darkness was loneliness.
Darkness was grief.
Darkness was the empty apartment I came home to every night, where no one waited for me and no voice ever called my name.
It was the silence that greeted me the moment I opened the door, wrapping around me like a second skin and reminding me, over and over again, just how alone I was.
Darkness was the weight lodged deep inside my chest, heavy and unrelenting, following me everywhere I went. It turned even the simplest tasks into exhausting battles no one else could see.
Getting out of bed.
Going to work.
Smiling when people expected me to.
Breathing through another day when all I wanted was for the ache inside me to stop.
Some wounds don't leave scars on your skin. They settle quietly in your soul, growing heavier with every passing year until you forget what it feels like to live without them.
By the time I was twenty-four, grief had become as familiar to me as my own reflection. It sat beside me during every meal, followed me through every sleepless night, and whispered reminders of everything I had lost whenever the world became too quiet.
That was what darkness meant to me.
Or at least, that's what I believed before the darkness found me.
It's not like the darkness inside me is anything new.
In fact, it's far from it.
As long as I can remember, darkness has lingered beneath my skin like a sickness I could never cure, washing over me in relentless waves that threatened to pull me under.
Some days it was a dull ache buried deep in my chest.
Other days it felt like a suffocating void, wrapping itself around my ribs and squeezing until it became difficult to breathe.
No matter how much I tried to escape it, the darkness always followed, patiently waiting for moments of silence so it could remind me that it was still there.
My life has been this way for as long as I can remember.
Over the years, I learned how to hide it.
I learned how to smile when I wanted to cry, how to laugh when everything inside me felt numb, and how to tell people I was fine even when I was falling apart.
At first, pretending was exhausting.
Every fake smile felt heavy on my face, every lie caught in my throat.
But eventually, it became second nature.
The mask I'd built became so convincing that people stopped looking beneath it.
Including my mother.
When I was younger, she used to ask if I was okay. She would study my face with concern in her eyes, as if she could sense the sadness I tried so desperately to hide.
But as the years passed and my acting improved, the questions became less frequent.
Eventually, they stopped altogether.
Part of me was relieved that I no longer had to explain feelings I didn't understand myself, but another part of me couldn't help wondering if maybe I had become too good at pretending.
Too good at convincing the world that I was okay when, deep down, I hadn't been okay for a very long time.
