Night
By Joshua Chen
It’s cold.
Dark.
10 PM at night
Alone, darkness enveloping you.
In your haze, you barely see the bright christmas lights decorating the neighborhood, signifying the warmth and the family unity of christmastime. In the corner of your eye, you see a dinner table, a family celebrating, cheering, laughing. Their house is warmly lit, some orange effect that you always craved for, a family spirit and heart that you spent your whole life looking for.
It all comes rushing back. The fear. The pain. The emptiness in your heart. No matter how far you ran you’d still come face to face with the inescapable heartbreak of your own loneliness. The tears start to drop from your face again, the exposure to your heartbreak full force in your heart.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
As a child, I had always been scared of the dark. Bad things lurked in the shadows. The boogie monster, the animatronics from Five Nights At Freddy’s, every single terrifying monster you could think of lurked there. In a way, I was scared of the unknown and the horrific things that could happen to me, and I’d duck under my blankets, cowering in fear from a monster that didn’t exist.
And yet, as things started to go terribly wrong, as my voice started to be silenced more and more often and the screaming and arguments started getting more and more frequent, I found myself without any place to go or anyone to talk to. As I sat in my chair as my parents screamed about my failures and how worthless I was, I was powerless, I couldn’t do anything, and yet I could feel the burning rage grow inside of like the ticking of a time bomb ready to explode at a moment’s notice.
And so in these rage-filled moments, I did the only thing that I could do.
I ran.
I ran to the darkness, opening my arms to it. I ran because I had nowhere else to go, running and screaming at the top of my lungs, cursing and crying until my throat ran dry, and I was just left with the empty emotions. Beside me I could hear the cars zoom past me, the streetlights shining its orange light, the harsh wind blowing across my bare skin, and I shivered from it. .
In that moment, I wanted to stay there, in the darkness. I wanted to be free of reality, free of the world that my parents had made for me. I wanted to be gone from my parents, to be in isolation and freedom, where I wouldn’t have to deal with the fear and the realities of the world. Instead, I’d be alone, free from people, free from life.
But the cold was a bitter reminder that I couldn’t stay forever. I was reminded that I couldn’t stay there or I’d freeze to death, and however emotionally unstable I was, my primitive instinct for survival led me home again.
After that first incident, the darkness and the night became my closest friends. If I had to vent, the night was there to listen. If I was theorycrafting about politics or philosophy, the night was always there listening to me ramble on without judging a single word I said.
I stopped trusting in people, and instead started trusting in the night. People were inconsistent, evil, and judgemental. The night was eternal, consistent, and never judged anything I did or said.
Day after day, night after night, I would walk alongside the night. Talking with it made me forget all of my problems, the fear filled moments of anxiety when I would suddenly remember my school project due tomorrow, the wind was always there to calm me down and think about it in a more productive and useful manner.
It was here within the safety of the night sky that I discovered so many of my ideas and my love for thinking. With the night egging me on, I was able to organize my thoughts in a way that I never knew how while rapidly producing new ones. With new ideas constantly flowing in, I had to grow, develop and adapt fast.
But it all boiled down to that special feeling of the night. The clean air, the cool breeze, the variety colored lighting and the spots of pure darkness, it made me feel like crying. For my whole life I had been searching for someone that could give me a chance to speak my mind without judging and biased by their own personal opinions, and the moment finally came, when I felt that I could finally scream about the issues that had plagued me my entire life, it was very cathartic and special to me.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Good things don’t last forever.
The night would eventually turn into day. Eventually, I would have to go back home, finish my homework, and sleep (hopefully without the screaming of my parents). I’d have to go to school again, and pretend like nothing was wrong.
But even then, I still went outside, talking with the night. No, I didn’t just talk to it, I relied on it, the comforting feeling of it. It showed me the beauty of the world, and provided my escape from the cruel world.
It was my mom that first noticed my tendency to run from my problems. In our arguments she would lambast me from “trying to run again.” Whenever I would bump my way to the door to the outside, she would scream at me, curse at me, violently shaking me in a wild display of anger. She told me that in life, there were things that I could not run from, and while I sat there, shaking with anger, knowing 100% how wrong she was, I could say nothing, I could do nothing, until I pushed passed her, running outside, to freedom and the warm embrace of night again.
Later, she would confess to me that she would start feeling jealous of my methods used to escape my problems. She saw my camadrie with my friends on the computer and my tendency to always run away, and she hated it. She had always tried to stop my relationship, to step on it so that I wouldn’t have anywhere to go but the family, and I had to follow their rules and guidelines.
Going outside into the night gradually became harder and harder as I found myself at the bottom end of the argument again, as my parents eventually resorted to physicality to block me from going out. Crying, screaming in anger, I could do nothing, and eventually I submitted to their ideals, to their ideal asian child, to be someone who would do his best to get good grades and join clubs so I could get into a good college and get into a good job.
And then on March 19, 2020, the novel Coronavirus got too big to handle, and the first stay at home order was issued, closing the door on my adventures with the embrace of night.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Quarantine has been a, well, mellow, experience for a lot of us. A lot of gaming and playing counter-strike, a lot of lying in bed and thinking, a lot of anime watching. A lot of arguments. Some suicide attempts, emailing the school’s counslor and trying to jump in front of a car, a week spent in a mental hospital.
A lot has happened since that morning when my class was pulled over by the english teacher and told that physical school could end at any moment.
In this time with quarantine I was able to break through farther than I ever had before. The cathartic experience of watching anime for the first time and seeing beautifully constructed characters like Killua Zoldyck, Okabe Rintaro, and Shinji Ikari, as these characters made me realize my about myself than multiple sessions of deep therapy and psychoanalysis.
It was a rollercoaster of a ride, quarantine was, with enough ups and downs to give someone motion sickness for the rest of his life, but it was an experience I’ll never forget.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
It was late at night when I heard its call again. It beckoned to me, calling to me. I hastily put on my jacket, running outside and unlocking the door. There it was again, the cool breeze and the warm orange lighting, the beauty of the darkness. Walking around the block in the cover of darkness again, I was finally home.
