I Wrote My Way Out of the Dark
One ugly page a day, until the pages got lighter than I was.
The first thing I wrote after five months of writing nothing was an inventory of my fridge, and I cried when I finished it, because it proved my hands still worked. Two yogurts, one lemon aging into a small planet, half a jar of pickle that nobody in the flat would ever finish.
That was the whole page. That was the beginning.
The dark had arrived the previous October, and it did not arrive the way films promise, with rain and violins.
It arrived like a slow leak. First I stopped answering calls on the first ring... Then I stopped answering.
Then the dishes started forming their own civilization in the sink, and I watched them from the bed with a kind of scientific detachment, the way you watch weather in another country.
I used to call myself a writer. That was the cruelest part of the whole arrangement. The dark did not take my appetite first, or my sleep first. It took the writing first, the one thing I would have used to fight it. Five months without a sentence. For a person who had scribbled since age nine, that was like a swimmer forgetting what water is for.
I want to be honest about the boring parts, because the boring parts saved my life. I did eventually see a doctor. There were small white pills and a laminated chart about sleep. I am not here to tell you a notebook cures a chemical fire. The pages did not replace the doctor. The pages replaced the silence.
The fridge list happened because of a power cut, of all things. The electricity died on a Tuesday evening and I had to figure out what would spoil, and the only way my fogged head could hold the information was to write it down. Pen, junk mail envelope, kitchen counter. Two yogurts. One lemon. Half a jar of pickle.
And something in my chest moved half an inch.
It was not joy... Joy was still out of stock. It was more like the feeling of a stuck window giving slightly. I stood in my dark kitchen holding an envelope with a shopping list of decay on it, and I thought: I made a page exist today.
So I invented a rule, and the rule had exactly one clause. One page a day, and the page was allowed to be terrible.
Terrible was not just permitted. Terrible was the point. The dark is a perfectionist; it whispers that if you cannot do a thing beautifully you should not do it at all, and then it hands you the bed. The ugly page was my way of spitting in its soup. I bought a notebook from the petrol station, the only shop I could face, a sad spiral thing with a lighthouse on the cover, and I began.
Day one: the fridge list, copied out with ceremony.
Day four: a formal complaint against the pigeon on my windowsill, who I had named Gerald and who judged me openly.
Day nine: a letter to my serotonin, asking where it was holidaying and whether it planned to send a postcard.
Day thirteen: the word no, written until my hand got bored of it.
Nobody frames these pages. No teacher would pass them. But every single one was an appointment I kept, and keeping any appointment at all was the heaviest lifting I had done in months.
I did not write because I was getting better. I got better because writing was the one appointment the dark could not talk me out of.
Somewhere around week seven, the pages started doing something I had not asked them to do.
They started answering back.
I was mid complaint about Gerald the pigeon, actually mid sentence, when my pen wrote this instead: You have not laughed since the funeral, and Dad would have hated that most of all.
I put the pen down and sat very still on the edge of the bed.
Here is what I had managed not to notice for five months...
The dark had moved in three weeks after we buried my father.
I had done the eulogy. I had handled the paperwork. I had been, by every visible measure, fine, and I had not written or spoken his name since November.
I had filed him away like an invoice, and the dark, it turns out, was the filing cabinet slowly falling over on me.
The ugly pages had been circling him the entire time. The fridge list was his fridge trick; he was the one who taught me to write down what would spoil. Gerald was funny because Dad named every animal he ever met. Even the letter to my serotonin had his exact brand of joking at the doctor's office. My grief had been writing to me for weeks, in disguise, waiting for me to recognize the handwriting.
So I stopped writing around him and wrote at him. For eleven days straight, the ugly page was about grief, and those pages were the ugliest and truest things I have ever put on paper. What he smelled like, which was cut grass and pipe smoke. The way he said my name from the front door. The last thing I told him, which was that I would call on Sunday, and the fact that Sunday came anyway.
I cried through most of them. The pages wrinkled and dried stiff, and I kept going, because the rule was one page a day and the rule had carried me this far.
Something shifted after those eleven days. Not fixed... Shifted.
The mornings stopped being cliffs and became hills. I washed the dishes and their civilization fell. I laughed once, alone, at something Gerald did, and the laugh startled me like a stranger in the house.
Around month four I ran out of things to complain about, which frightened me, so I went looking for fuel and found a page of poetry prompts online. One of them said: write about a light you never turn on. I wrote about the lamp in my father's study, and the page came out with line breaks in it. I had not written a poem in six years. Apparently the pages had decided it was time.
In the spring I did something that would have been unthinkable in October. I typed up one of the grief poems, the one about the lamp, and posted it on a community wall for poets, where strangers put their work up next to other strangers. A woman I will never meet commented four words: day 41 here, thanks. I read that comment maybe thirty times. Somewhere out there, someone else was keeping the same appointment.
It has been two years. I still take the small white pills, and I still see the doctor, and I still write one page a day, though the pages have changed. They got lighter. Not lighter as in shallow. Lighter as in the way a room gets when someone finally opens the curtains you forgot were closed.
The lighthouse notebook sits at the bottom of a stack of eleven now. Sometimes I reread page one and I can hardly stand how small it is, and how much weight it carried.
Today's page says: two yogurts, one lemon, and I am here.
It is not a poem... It is better than a poem.
It is true.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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