Where the dark things are

Bring a map and a torch.

Dear Writer,

After watching Sharp Objects last week, I called my best friend Kelly. She loves that show; it was on her recommendation that I watched it. I was still reeling from the experience. I hadn’t craved a dark fiction experience in a long time, probably since I was a teenager and slasher films were all the rage, but I’d craved one that weekend and boy… did I get what I asked for.

When we talked about it, Kelly told me she’d read the book a number of times, and watched the mini-series over and over, and she loved it every time. I didn’t ask her why she loved it; it didn’t occur to me to ask. I’m not sure she would be able to answer if I did ask her that question, any more than I would be able to answer if she’d asked me why I was suddenly craving dark stories.

I have no earthly idea.

Our discussion got me thinking about how we all tread our dark places in our own individual ways. Our darkness belongs to us, it is ours, and we deal with it as we will. No judgment. I dealt with my darkness by whistling past it, making jokes, pretending it wasn’t there. For almost 50 years, I did that. I tried to battle darkness by becoming lighter and frothier and fluffier until finally, I’d made myself brittle. And when the darkness came for me, I cracked.

It’s probably best, before talking about darkness, to define it. What does darkness even mean, anyway? More importantly, as I’m the one who gets to define my own darkness, what does it mean to me?

When trying to work out what an idea means, the dictionary is my standard starting place, and the dictionary says darkness is “the partial or total absence of light” and “wickedness or evil.”

Huh.

I don’t see my internal darkness as wicked or evil; I see it as the space in which I face wickedness and evil. But in order to face wickedness and evil, I have to travel to them. They sure as shit aren’t coming to my turf, where I’ve got lights and scented candles and romantic comedies running 24/7. I have built a life that doesn’t invite the darkness in. But it just occurs to me now that by refusing to go into those dark spaces, I’ve let the darkness define its own territory, and I’ve probably ceded quite a bit of space where I could have comfortably hung out a bit in my life.

Maybe that’s my answer to why: I craved the dark stories because I was tired of playing defense.

Maybe.

For many, many years, I would not go into those dark spaces. I was all three monkeys at once; see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. But that’s just denial, isn’t it? Saying something isn’t there, refusing to acknowledge it, doesn’t make it not there. If anything, it gives it more power, because it’s able to slink around in the spaces I won’t enter, doing damage in places I refused to chart, in ways I refused to understand.

For most of my life, when watching something scary, I would close my eyes when the bad things happened. When all I did was listen, the sounds would spark horrors in my imagination that were a million times worse than anything the screen would show me. Instead of giving the movie or TV show less power, I gave it more. I let it inside my mind, where it did so much more damage than if I had never looked away at all.

There are theories out there about why we enjoy horror movies. I mean, on the surface, it doesn’t really make sense. Why do we want to be scared? Why do we enjoy experiencing, through fiction, the horrible things that people can do to each other? Why do we feel the need to see a glimpse of the monsters that prowl in the dark, waiting to take us? Does it make us feel safer, like we’ve navigated a map and can mark the spots where the beasts lay in wait?

I don’t know. Maybe. All I know about any of it is that the most powerful love I’ve ever felt is when I fell into darkness, and I cracked, and my best friend took my hand and said, “I know this place. I will lead you through it, and on the way out, we’ll hit the good bars. I know where they all are.”

And she walked me through.

We can’t whistle the darkness away. Or laugh it away, or love it away. We can only lead each other through it. Kindness, community and love in the face of darkness shows us where the real power lies.

And it’s not even a contest.

Everything,

L