When one is young, darkness holds its own confused anxiety. What’s unknown, unseen, is waiting for you to make the wrong move, and take you from your childish safety.

I don’t remember when day became the source of fear, and night a comforting relief. It was a slow, intangible shift. With the fading of illusory stability, daylit reality lost much of its charm. It expects so much, watches so much.

Do, get, achieve.
Interact, help – but don’t get in anyone’s way.
Stumble, rise, apologize.

Now the night is all my own. I have no fear of my lifelong friend. I never ask for her forgiveness, for there are no boundaries to trespass. She sits with me silently, asking nothing, and for a time I have no fear.

Then she leaves me, and I stand alone again on shifting ground.

It’s how it should be.