For Every Missing Shade

Short Story 2: By Morning Light

Every once in a while I get stressed.

Some call it a panic attack, some call it anxiety.

I just lie and say it's normal.

It usually happens towards the end of the day. There's something about the sun going down that makes everything else rise up. I think my brain is wired so the brightness of the Earth matches the brightness of my thoughts.

It's like I'm in a submarine and I'm slowly going down in the water. At the top, I can see the shining light. I can see new fish, the coral reefs. There are colors, and colors are exciting.

But, I keep

sinking.

This place I'm in keeps falling lower and lower as the sun loses its light. It gets darker each foot lower I get. All I want is to break out of this capsule I'm stuck in and swim towards the light, but I can't. With every foot lower, with every speck of light that leaves my vision, it gets worse. I try to calm myself down, telling myself that it will all be different in the morning.

Everyone always says it will be better in the morning, but morning isn't now and now I'm scared.

I used to hate the night. Every time my dreams woke me up, I wouldn't go back to sleep until 4:00 am. The night scared me, and I knew that someone, somewhere, got up at least by 4:00. The comfort in knowing that someone was awake, that someone had started their day, and they were no longer stuck in this darkening spiral made me feel better.

I thought that as long as it was someone's day, I would be okay.

Whenever the sun started going down, I would do two things: I would try to make my world as bright as possible, and I would do whatever I wanted. I would frantically turn on lights, pulling down the curtains, turning on lamps, etc. I would hole up in my room and watch tv shows, play video games, and do anything I wanted to get my mind off of it.

Now, every time it happens, I don't play video games. I don't turn on all of my lights, and I don't watch tv. All I do now is turn on my phone and open my messages.

Messages to Her, to be exact.

I know how crazy I sound. I know that I'm this unrealistic psycho who's flying off the rails. But I can't help it. It's an oxymoron, but I feel like the only rational thing to do at this point is to let myself go crazy. By every stretch of the imagination, it doesn't make sense. But with my limited experience around love, that's the way it's supposed to be.

It's so odd the way love becomes more necessary the less it makes sense.

She fills me. She is color, and she is real. I'm falling, and I finally have a parachute. I can't wait to go crazy.

Maybe my calling in life is to fly off the rails in the best way possible.