text: I hugged her. I hated her. The girl with tears streaming down her face sat crumpled on the floor before me, dejected. She was supposed to be my best friend. I hated her. It had been an emotional night. Thinking back, I couldn’t remember what had triggered her emotional outburst. I couldn’t remember exactly how the threads of conversation had twisted and turned until the knot of emotion in this girl’s heart had been revealed. Maybe it had been a joke that had hit too close to home. I don’t know whether it was my personality, my sense of humor, or just the twisted sense of satisfaction I got when I made people squirm, but I had always been good at making jokes that hit a bit too close to home. Jokes that would make people laugh in the moment, then lay awake at night wondering just how much truth there was to it. Jokes about the very things that kept me up at night. It didn’t matter what had led us to this point, all that mattered was that we were here. And I hated it. Hated her. I held her in my arms a moment longer before finally letting go. It should have been the other way around. I should have been the one being held. If only she weren’t so weak, it would have been me. She had said the same thing herself; that she was weak, that she was embarrassed, that she didn’t want to be seen this way. She wiped tears from her eyes, undoubtedly trying to erase the memories of the last few hours, from both her mind and ours. There was another girl there, though only a year older than me and my “best friend,” she was a motherly figure. Mature. Wise. It was impossible to imagine that she had ever gone through the same troubles that had brought the other girl to tears. Though, of course, she had. They all had. Still were. Some problems you never really get over. I was the same, of course. Still am. I put on a mask, but inside I was no different than the others. All humans are the same; scared. Scared of being alone. Scared of the unknown. Scared of the dark. We try so hard to live our lives in the light, sheltered. We hide. We hide behind our parents. We hide behind our friends. We hide behind our teachers, bosses, government. We do anything we can to hide behind labels and conceal others under the same. Anything to avoid seeing the truth. The truth is dark. My “friend” was getting hugged again, this time by the motherly figure. She was speaking to her again, with that firm but loving voice that I so longed to hear. My face concealed the hatred I felt. I felt like I had spent my whole life walking a lit path in the darkness. There was nothing but inky blackness all around me, no stars, no fires, no man-made lights. I pressed on, not through any desire of my own, but because it was what I was expected to do. As soon as I passed a bit of path, whatever ethereal, unseen light source that had kept it lit winked out, and I was left slowly fleeing from an ever-encroaching darkness. I wasn’t alone on the path, on occasion I would pass another, on occasion another would pass me. Sometimes they walked off into the darkness, never to be seen again. Most of the time they just pressed on in the same monotonous slog that I was trapped in. One girl had traveled with me longer than anyone else, neither passing nor being passed. She still knelt on the floor before me. Eventually we reached the end of the path. Darkness stretched out before and behind us. To the sides as well. Only the small square we stood on remained lit. It winked out. We both knew what we had to do. I stepped forward, intending to proceed as I always had. She, surprising me, jumped. When I was young I had feared the dark. I would make my parents leave my bedroom door open at night, with a light on in the hallway. I made them get me a night light. Eventually it got so bad that after they had tucked me into bed I would get up and turn the light back on. I got really good at sleeping with the light on. After that had gone on a long time my father sat me down and told me that people don’t fear the dark, not really. They fear what lurks in the dark. He told me that it was okay, though, because if there was nothing there in the light then there would be nothing there in the dark. The words that had comforted me as a child terrified me as an adult because, in that last moment before the light had winked out and I had been forced to step into darkness, I had looked around and seen exactly what I had most feared. Nothing. I fell. I tried to scream in the darkness, but it was pointless. In this void there was no air, nothing that I could fashion into a scream. I looked up and saw a tiny pinprick of light. My “friend’s” jump had been successful, she now stood on a newly lit platform just a few feet forward and a few inches higher from where the last one had ended. And I hated her for it. I kept falling and soon that pinprick of light had completely faded. All was dark. If only I had the strength to cry.