In The Light of the Room

I can feel it there. Slithering around in the darkness. Its presence burns an ever-expanding hole in the blanket that covers me. My eyes are squeezed shut as I fight back the urge to snap them open to check. Why this is my instinct to comfort me, I do not know. I know what I’ll see in the mouldy, milky light of my phone.

Why does it never stop? It continues, ebbing and drawing from me with every breath I take. The constant pattern of inhalation and exhalation threatened.

When I pray to my father, I never feel comforted. The tightness wraps itself around my throat and pulls. Cotton covers slip toward the end of the bed, but I  keep pulling them tighter and tighter around me. The small crescents of the milky moon bury themselves into the fleshy pads of my palm.  

In the light of the room, I hear it singing. She calls to me. A faint note, extended, wrapping itself through the branches of the trees that bash themselves against my window.

Piercing slashes of the moon dice through the curtains, but I refuse to open my eyes. I will not confront it. I will not acknowledge it. That is the only way I know.

In the light of the room, the glow casts a face—dark and quiet, in a place where mourning is met with monsters. Feeding off the darkness to perpetuate more. She won’t leave. She never does.

I must wait until morning. But I will not open my eyes.