some people avoid the dark, the nothing, the void

it’s the silence between responses
the parts of themselves they’ve buried
the questions they’re afraid to ask
the truths they can’t sit with

it is uncertainty, grief, failure
loneliness, complexity, contradiction
everything that doesn’t resolve neatly

they fill it with noise
with productivity, with performance
or they skim its surface
extracting what they can use
without ever really being in it

some people survive the dark by shutting down
some become sharp, numb, unreachable
some just keep running from it forever

some don’t always know
how to meet someone else there
without collapsing or cutting them off

what we don’t want to feel
what we fear will swallow us
what we sometimes do to each other
when we don’t know how to hold that void

but there is a way to breathe here too
we can meet others here too
not by pretending to be the light
but by knowing that
staying with someone in the dark
is a kind of light