Darkness is often not the comfort we seek. When children it can be a refuge, a time that wraps around us and greets us when we drift into sleep. As adults darkness can be a double-edged sword comfort danger, separate or melded into one. Closing your eyes greeting sleep that feels almost greedy, like it will absorb the pain life uses to slice you open revealing places inside never meant for exposure. Or lets you slip into it as you recall happiness from recent events you never understand as succinctly until that moment.

For me grief is a brick by brick wall that instead of protecting me hollows me out with waves of sorrow coming unexpectedly. And it is always while I sleep that the worst of the anguish I hold is a knife throwers paradise with me as the target. I wake abruptly, the horror of memory demanding action. Then I recall that there is nothing that can be done to undo the past, words, deeds, and even things left undone unsaid.

I awoke then with a sensation of death standing directly over me looking down into my terrified eyes revealing the emptiness that only death can fill. Its breath smelled not of things dead and rotting, but sweet like I was standing in the center of a huge rose, garden.

“Sh,” death said. “It is not your time, but I visit to press my thumb against your beating heart so you always remember me.”

The pain was sharp and severe. Heart attack, I thought, but it faded almost instantly. I was standing face pressed against the glass of a window, didn’t recognize anything outside in the dancing sparkling moonlight.

Then I felt a touch of tenderness and heard a quiet warm feminine voice. “You are safe here. Sometimes the worst of our memories declare us unfit to continue and scream in voices too frightening to be heard while we sleep. You will heal physically, but few of us heal on the inside where we need healing the most. When you are fit, I will show you more places that can lead you to lands unlike any in you best dreams and memories.”