When the Darkness Went to Bed

I won awards for that.

It was featured in the paper.

I won a school poetry competition.

And then a citywide competition.

And then placed second in a nationwide competition.

I won one thousand pounds and the opportunity to be published in a collection of amateur poetry.

The poem fucking took me places.

It opened doors for me.

I wrote again, in a poetry column for a couple of years.

I compiled a book full of my own writing that was translated into thirty different languages.

My poetry was taught to goddamn students. They learnt about me.

That poem got me places.

I dragged me down.

I could have been huge, I could have been bigger, I could have been better.

I fucking hate the word ‘could.’

I fucking hate the word ‘fuck.’

But if you say ‘fuck’ then people notice you. They pay attention to you; the word jars something in them, and then suddenly, you’re real. There’s a stigma around it, see?

If you say, ‘suck,’ then no one could care less.

Change one letter and the whole of proper society goes to shit.

We’re a society that’s built on words. Every building, every human, every aspect of our creation. They all started with a word.

Wars are fought over words.

Love is lost.

People die.

I think, if I were to die, I’d want it to be because of a word.

I couldn’t give less of a shit what word it is.

Some part of me would quite like it to be the word ‘fuck.’

Just to mess with people. Just to upset them a bit.

Upsetting people gets their attention. Makes them angry. I like to rile people up, get them annoyed.

Because then they look at me and they realise I’m there.

I like it when people know that I’m here.

Even if it’s only because they wish I wasn’t.

It’s easy to lose an hour in the mirror just staring. Memorising your nose and the contours of your face because one day it may be too easy to just wake up and be fucking gone.

No one sees me anymore.

And one day, neither will I.

Once, I went a whole week with no one talking to me, can you believe that? An entire fucking week.

I got into a fight with a shop owner. I screamed at him. I slammed my hands against his till. I ripped a display to shreds.

I got arrested.

I spent eight hours and thirty-six minutes in prison.

“Why did you do it?” a police officer asked me.

He looked me straight in the eyes. I looked straight back. We had a momentless moment, the two of us.

“Fuck,” I said back. And the police officer got angry because there is a stigma surrounding that word.

He scolded me and only me for at least ten minutes.

He didn’t understand, even by the end of it.

It had been an entire fucking week.

And he scolded me and only me.

I could have fucking hugged him.

Swearing became a habit about two years ago. It’s like drugs only it doesn’t kill you.

Unfortunately.

I’m at that point where I could never kill myself yet some part of me wonders how easy it would be to die.

Death by swearing.

What a way to go.

I love words.

I love them and I hate them.

I worship them and am terrified by them.

I never want to hear them, but my ears hurt if it goes too long.

My words were taught in goddamn schools.

Not many people can say that.

My parents were quite religious growing up. I thought I should be as well. And then I discovered that they’re all just words. Christianity. Judaism. Islam. Hinduism. All different languages. But they’re all made of words just the same.

So I stopped going to church. Started listening. Paying attention. Just shutting the fuck up and taking a look at what was going on around me really.

Swearing.

I started swearing.

It’s not sacrilegious, is it, to say that words are my religion and swearing is my prayer?

People are my gods.

I can’t stop thinking about them and blame them for when things go wrong.

What a sorry and depressed bastard I sound like right now.

Shit.

Sorry.

Can we start over?

Shit.

Oh, fucking hell.

Sorry, sorry, I started writing this as a way to tell people what actually happened, what actually went down. I started writing it a couple of months ago actually. When I was arrested for the second time. And then I got angry and burnt the pages. Lost fucking everything. That’s why this time I’ve sworn to myself that nothing gets deleted. Every word I type is here to stay. Every mistake is carefully documented.

Like I said, I had this idea a couple of months ago when I decided to write down my ‘story.’ I got three pages in and realised I can’t write down my ‘story’ because I haven’t fucking got one. I’ve got a life, and there’s an important distinction to make there.

Stories fly from adventure to adventure, action to action.

Life meanders from one to the other, taking years, taking days.

Taking seconds that feel like fucking eternities.

And in stories you don’t suddenly turn around and find yourself feeling years older, with two criminal offenses to your name, and no real fucking clue how you got there.

Anyway.

I don’t know how to start this. I’m not sure how to go about explaining to you the details of what really happened.

Here are the basics:

It happened.

It happened to you.

It happened to him.

It happened to everyone.

It happened to fucking me, I’ll tell you that one.

Here’s the most important bit:

I happened.

Jesus, how romanticised does that sound now?

Look, let me just cut to the chase.

Six months ago, I realised I hadn’t spoken to people in a week. I went and threw a fit in a shop. I got arrested.

I got a letter.

I read the letter.

I cried.

I got released.

I paid a fine, and went on to live my life in fucking peace.

And then he showed up at my door.

He showed up at my door and started a war that I was never going to fucking win. He wouldn’t go away.

I swore at him and he didn’t bat an eyelid.

I think that maybe he was too young to understand.

He was so tiny. He was like a human being that had forgotten to look like one. He could break if I coughed too close to him.

Two major events happened in the last six months.

One: He showed up at my door.

Two: He died.

He was so tiny. I don’t think you understand. The whole world should have looked at him, and wanted to give him a hug. They should have wanted to protect him.

Hell, I wanted to protect him most of the time.

Other times, I wanted to slam his fucking head in the door.

I’m not helping myself at the moment, am I?

Shit.

Oh, God, I thought writing was going to be easy and organised, but what is?

Isn’t it supposed to be inspired? Shouldn’t I be sitting here and letting the words pour out of me? This happened, this is me, this is my life that I’m putting onto paper. Isn’t that simple?

I think it’s because it’s my life that it’s more difficult. I can’t make any of it up. I have to tell you what happened; I have to let you know.

Because at this point, even I don’t really believe me. Even I’m starting to doubt everything I thought.

He was so tiny, and his clothes were always too big.

His hair was too long as well; it got in his eyes.

He used to use the back of his right hand to brush it away so that he could see.

He was so fucking tiny.

But it wasn’t the fact that he was physically delicate that broke him, that’s what I’m starting to realise.

It was the fact that he looked at the world, held out his heart, and practically begged someone to take it.

He was so unbelievably odd. Strange.

Fucking mental, if we’re being honest. Insane.

They didn’t put this in the paper, but do you want to hear a story?

Once upon a time, there was this tiny twig of a child. He got bullied at school for having weird hair and clothes. He got punched until his eyes turned purple and his nose cried in red. He was strung up and decorated with the colours of childhood cruelty. When he got home, he was told that some children hit other children to try and feel better about themselves.

Then this child — this fucking twig of a child — lit up like it was Christmas in August.

Because in his mind he’d made someone feel better about themselves. And he’d take one thousand black eyes one thousand days in a row to feel like that.

He just didn’t understand cruelty, I think.

He looked at the world in all its torn apart disgrace, and just forgot to see the ugly.

Who fucking does that?

He did. That’s the answer. He could have found the humanity in a serial killer.

I miss him.

So fucking much that it hurts and I can’t breathe.

Sometimes I can see him. I’ll turn around and catch a glimpse of too-long hair out of the corner of my eye. And then he’s gone, and I have to remember all over again that’s he’s never coming back.

His big thing was the importance of relationships. Everyone has them, was his logic, so they should be taken seriously and analysed. Documented away.

That was where I came in.

That was where he needed my help.

He needed me to find the darkness for him. Because he couldn’t see it by himself.

And I suppose, in a way, I needed him to dispel the darkness from me.

How did he word it? There was something he said…

Shit, what was it?

Oh, Jesus Christ, I can’t even remember now.

No, wait.

Got it.

I needed him to put the darkness to bed for me.

That was what he was so fucking good at.

That was what made him special.

He could put the darkness to bed. `