terahertz

When she was a child she was afraid of the dark. So much so that she had to go to a number of therapists, each one extolling the virtues of darkness until as last she got over her nyctophobia.

The years between her childhood and her early twenties passed without incident. Until there was an incident.

After which she became scared of the light. The clinical term for it being photophobia. Although her doctors were always quick to point out that the term only meant a sensitivity to light, not an actual fear of it.

“So then I don’t have photophobia” she would point out even quicker. She often lamented the fact that there weren’t more high-paying careers in pointing things out quickly.

She would think back on her sessions as a child, listening to all the wonderful things that transpired under the cloak of darkness, and it became impossible not to long for a place less ‘bright.’ It seemed to her that more terrible things happened in broad daylight than ever occurred in the dark.

Darkness needed her imagination to invent monsters, in the light they were plainly visible to the human eye. Sometimes they were all she could see.

So she closed her eyes and refused to open them until she was in a dark place.

The psychologists would counsel her that refusing to go out into the sunshine, to participate in the community, ‘civil society’ they would call it, was indeed putting herself in the very definition of a ‘dark place.’

“Right, that’s the point” she would answer curtly.

“We are speaking metaphorically” they would collectively reply.

“Do you even get to use parenthesis when speaking collectively?” she would inquire, certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was entitled to them when engaged in such tasks as inquiring.

“Well, technically we’ve all said the same thing, just in different ways and over an extended period of time, so…” they would offer up as grounds for such punctuational consideration. Collectively, of course.

“So no, you don’t get parenthesis” she would conclude.

Well, this certainly doesn’t look right, they didn’t actually say, but would have if given the opportunity. To which she had to admit they had a point.

Trying her hand as speaking collectively she finishes with light can be described by scientists as electromagnetic radiation or discreet wave-packets of energy, but the truth is that your average person has no idea what light is. And darkness is typically described as a lack of light, so a lack of something that nobody really understands. How can that not be a good thing?

It’s at this point you must be asking yourself “What incident?”

She’d rather not go into it. All she will say is that it involved an English Teacher.

“The darker the night, the brighter the stars.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment