you don’t want to understand

there are times late at night when everything seems surreal. it’s when you’re at that point where you’ve already been laying awake for hours trying to shut your eyes. your eyes refuse to listen or perhaps it isn’t exactly the eyes fault (the eyes that have by this point grown circles so dark that it almost makes you feel like laughing) no it isn’t the fault of the eyes, rather it is your mind that holds the real blame. after all isn’t it your thoughts that are keeping you from sleep? at this point, you find yourself wondering if anything is real as it seems or if there is something else something beyond the darkness around you. something that would make this all seem worth it perhaps? or maybe it is just the opposite, and it is something horrible and dark.

you wonder if you are losing your mind only to remember that only the sane question their sanity, and you can’t remember where you heard that only you have to believe that it is the truth, but the alternative is frightening to even consider. your thoughts are beginning to wander now, and they float far away from you, and the world that you have always known. they drift into some other world, or worlds rather, places that are beautiful for all that they are horrifying. and it makes you wish that you could close your eyes if only because seeing the things you see, understanding things that you never wanted to understand. things like people. people are never the things anyone truly wants to understand, or at least not the people who make the bad choices the choices that make the rest of us shake our heads and cluck our tongues. those are the people you are beginning to understand and they shape the world until it feels like you are in a different world entirely and you wonder, not for the first time, why you can’t just close your eyes.

there are things in this world, in this life of yours, that you no longer wish to understand. and people, the worst that humanity has to offer, it is those people whom you wish you didn’t get. they say that they are crazy and perhaps you are crazy too, since it seems that you can understand them. understand how they got to where they ended up, you can almost see their strange logic, alien and weird reasoning, and yet you can understand it. perhaps it is only alien because it is unfamiliar and maybe eventually you will understand fully and it won’t seem so alien anymore. a part of you hopes for that, while the rest of you begs to remain in the dark.

the dark, the dark that surrounds you now, the dark that keeps things hidden, the unwanted things, the scary things, and maybe, just maybe, not seeing those horrors, the things that parents tell their children about to scare them, perhaps by not seeing them you will be spared the fear that those things will bring. some say that knowing is more important than a sound state of mind, but you don’t think so. sometimes, you think to yourself quietly, sometimes the dark is good. sometimes it protects instead of harms. being oblivious isn’t always something to be avoided.

the dark protects you.