Mind the gaps
You don't see them because you don't want to. I think its an evolved trait of humanity. Our minds block out horrible things like how victims of molestation forget, or people in car accidents with amnesia. I think this is like that, except our brains are hardwired to just, blank them out, beforehand, while it's happening. Just your mind telling your eyes , "Nope, we don't see anything."
They exist in the gaps. Those crevices and holes and nooks that light never gets to. The deep, dark places, but not just dark. Those spots in our world where existence is smudged a bit, the black pathways where our world is smothered out. They've always existed there. Before man, their worlds were the deep caves, the rotting hollow logs that the witless mouse climbs into, and never comes out. Hate, death...maybe anti-life is better. Things that despise light and life and air. Because of us, there are so many now. So many new places to hide.
That space in the corner of your room between the wall and the dresser. Behind the crack in the foundation in your basement. All the dark places that we've created. We gave them so many windows and doors to watch us through. That gap between the elevator door and your floor that we look at but immediately look away from and block out of our mind. You think to yourself, "I don't want to look down there. I'm really high up." The thought crosses your mind to bring a flashlight with you one day, shine it down that gap. But you always forget, don't you? You never do it because your brain knows and doesn't want to see.
One day maybe you're like me. I'm an athiest. I don't believe in those things. Maybe religion, religion was like a stopper that we created. I always thought it was for stupid fools, but I wish I had a God to pray to now. Maybe we created religion so our minds could excuse our obvious ignorance. That way there are things that we don't look at too closely because, "evil, you know? And that's ok because Heaven is where I'm going." I think Heaven is a place with no dark places. I want to believe in it now. But I don't think it works when you know. Faith is faith because you don't know. You no longer get to choose to believe in God if you meet a demon first.
One day you do what I do. You look. Not just glance, but lean in REAL close. Put your nose up to that old hole in the wall where the faucet used to be and smell and listen and peer into the darkness that light just drowns in. You look.
And you smell, the damp, moldy, acidic bile. You hear the slimy tentacles rubbing over the rotting leather and the clicking legs of rigid exoskeletons. You see...
Oh god you see.
And then you never stop seeing....or smelling...or hearing...
At the back of your sock drawer a purple spider leg the size of a broom handle disappears beneath the folded cotton lumps when you open it. That smell drifts out from under your bathroom sink while you hear something that sounds like a scaly walrus trying to come through the hole in the bottom of your toilet.
The yellow eye with two blood red pupils looks back at you from behind the grate over the vent in your living room.
And then you wake up one night in a panic and flip the light switch on because you feel a cold rope wrapping around and around your chest...and you taste death in your mouth. And suddenly you have faith. You believe with all your heart that one day soon you're going to stand too close to a cracked door to an empty room, or the opening to a storm drain alongside a street. Then something will come out of that dark place. Something with pinkish white skin that sizzles in the light that wraps itself around your legs and suddenly your ribs are snapping one by one like twigs while blood gushes out of your mouth and you desperately claw at the curb and you feel your legs being melted off by acid while being chewed on at the same time. And then you're gone from light forever, and the real pain begins.
I wish I had a God to pray to.
