LET DARKNESS COME

Here's a piece written as a freewrite several years ago.

Let Darkness Come

The route to darkness meanders down through nightmares that entangle and cloud the light. Buried emotions attack the jugular vein, scream deadly slogans, tackle us when we least expect it. I had a friend who spent the last ten years of living, looking for outs to his clinically depressed existence. He tried suicide almost as many times as I tried new lovers from overdosing to carbon monoxide to slamming his Harley into the side of Compass Bank. I talked him back into life almost every time. He’d grin like a devil sick of sin: “Yeah, I’m crazy. You’re crazy. We all are.” He pulled me down on him. Then he’d walk into a dark room and begin the descent over and over and over again. I look back at those early mornings when he’d take me on his Harley around Monte Sano, a winding mountain road. And I remember the last time he called me at 4 a.m. Sunday. He said he was walking alone into the darkness and asked if I would join him. I was scared, knew he spoke a language I didn’t understand, and immediately drove over to his place—near county highway 9. When I got there, about fifteen minutes from my apartment, everything was dark. The door was cracked; I walked in. The silence was deafening. Nobody was there. I knew in my bones Jimmy was gone forever and drove home to sit by the phone until I heard something. His cousin called at 10—Jimmy shot himself in the head at Lake Guntersville near the state lodge. His body was slumped against a picnic table. I felt cold, my jaw locked, and I slammed down the phone.