Luminox
Photo by Tom Frances Palattao on Unsplash
A Prose Poem by A. A. Kostas
I.
Darkness is not absence, it has speed and thrust. It rushes in at the slightest wavering of light, at the flickering of a candle, at the movement of my fingers before the projector. It whomps me in my gut every time I let a little bit of light go out or when I lick my fingertips and quench the holy flame so I can take a break from that aching clarity and try to relax for a second. I’m a sucker for the miniscule moment between when the light goes out and the dark pummels my insides, and my Lord, it is a brief moment. The quickest moment that can ever occur, because that brisk light is not the fastest thing in the universe, no matter what they tell you—it’s tied neck-and-neck with the speed of darkness. In the micro-instant the light stops, the dark starts.
II.
Pulling in the dark never feels as good as pushing out the light, because that feels so fun and mischievous and like sinking into a warm mud bath and then putting your whole head under. Sulphur gets into your nose and ears and eyes and you wriggle in pleasure at how rebellious you are being by pushing out the light. But then you start feeling breathless and heavy and you’d really like to stand up in the mud bath so you can open your mouth and maybe just hang out there, half-in, half-out with your arms splayed over the edge in a lukewarm kind of way. You start wishing there was some other thing aside from the dark or the light, like an empty thing. Does that exist? Can you push out dark without pulling in light? Maybe you can smuggle in some nothingness and with enough boxes of void the darkness will run out of room and you won’t feel so strangled or have to deal with that sharp light.
III.
Let me tell you how much I’ve tried to fight the dark, becoming a militant anti-darker with so much strength that I should have a trophy for pushing out darkness. Or at least putting up my best effort. The darkness is so solid and uniform that I get fooled into thinking I have to be the same, rigid and fearsome, and work on my willpower so I can overcome it. I’ll do lots of boxing exercises at the gym and ignore my burnt fingertips from putting out the light. It’s not even about the light now, it’s about facing down darkness, defeating it or at least subduing it so instead of drowning me from the inside, it’s beaten into a dense lump that can sit in the center of my chest like a hunk of charred flesh. Its weight does not change, but it’s concentrated in one place, hanging around my neck like a medallion, awarded by myself for serving bravely in the ongoing war against the dark.
IV.
It’s the headaches that finally get to me, all that dark sitting around my neck wasn’t doing me any favors and it wasn’t like there was any less of it just because I’d punched it a thousand times; it was only in a different shape and I was carrying it a bit better than in the beginning. But after a while I get these migraines with a sharp pain and nausea and blinding flashes that zap my optic nerves like cattle prods. Lightning storms in my skull. And it reminds me of the light, how much it can hurt yet feel so good to finally see clearly, how there aren’t any shadows in the light, nothing left unsaid or unheard. Why get lit up by cracks of lightning when you could sit in the sun? At least, that’s what I end up thinking after tossing around in the dark like it’s the biggest bed you could imagine, with scratchy sheets and pillows that get hotter the longer you lie on them. Maybe if I reach out and grab the lightning I can blow up the dark, harness a little of that celestial firepower to get things moving in here. But that kind of light is over too quickly, the dark is right on its heels, gone just as it’s arriving.
V.
I need something to catch the lightning, like a net or a metal spike or a kite-with-a-key. But everything I try displaces light back into dark and it’s swallowed up, like it never existed and I can hardly remember how the light ever survived when the dark is always around. How does it get off the ground with so much weight dragging it down? I had the right idea, just a wrong understanding. I needed to catch the light, but the light also needed to catch me. I needed to be set alight. For that I needed kindling, needed to shave down the darkness or re-assemble it to catch and burn, so when lightning strikes, it won’t vaporise upon contact with the dark; no it will spark and sputter and dance and start to consume. Yeah, that’s right, it’s going to bloom like the most destructive flower you’ve ever seen, churning through that dark like it’s oil, begging me to fan the flames, open up the windows for some air and let the light rush through me, a firestorm, a light tornado. It’s going to be wild and visible. I’ll see the whole show and wonder where that thick, heavy dark went. But I won’t wonder for long, because who has time for darkness when there’s light to grow?
A. A. Kostas is a Canadian-Australian writer and lawyer, currently based in Singapore. Most recently, his work has been published or is forthcoming in The Clayjar Review, The Rialto Books Review, After Dinner Conversation and Ekstasis. You can read more of his work on Substack: https://waymarkers.substack.com/
