no3

I believe in the fear of the night. Not the darkness that the night brings, but the silence — the time when there is nothing to hide my myself from my own screaming thoughts. The time when I cannot escape my demons, for my demons are inside of me. The silence unleashes them into my mind, enabling them to eat away at my soul, at my insecurities, making them weaker than they already are.

I believe that at night, I am at my weakest point. I am alone, vulnerable to anything and everyone. However, sometimes, I find comfort in the loneliness, but nights like that are limited. Most nights I find myself eating away at different thoughts, often keeping me awake for hours on end. During these insomnia filled nights, it's as if there is a jar of thoughts in my head that has tipped over and all the thoughts have spilled out, scattering into the open and then hiding in every crevice of my brain so that I must stay up just to put all the thoughts back into the jar.

Stephen King once said, "Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win." I believe that this true. Surely the monsters and ghosts inside of us our not literal, but metaphorical. The night is the time in which monsters and ghosts come out to get us. My monsters are my insecurities, I call them my demons. My ghosts are my memories, they sneak up on me when I am least expecting it. At times, my haunting memories can bring back a sense of happiness that used to fill me, but at the darkest hours of the night I'm only left alone with a cold nostalgia of what I used to have.

That is the root of my fear of the night – the monsters and ghosts that come out. I don't want to be alone and vulnerable. I don't want to go to bed because I'm scared. I'm scared of being alone with my demons and ghosts. I'm scared of letting them inside my head. I'm tired of letting them in my head. I'm tired of the burden of my demons and ghosts. I'm tired of the silence, of the loneliness, of being vulnerable. I'm tired of my fear of the night. But this fear of the night, of the silence and the loneliness that accompanies it, that is what has made me who I am.

I have come to believe that this fear is something I need. I believe in this fear for it is something I cannot run from nor can I hide from. The world doesn't stop spinning, the paradox of night and day is never broken, the monsters don't fail to come out to get me, and the fear is never ending.