Average Autistic In Recovery

Living with Darkness

There is a point in time when it is lost. You won’t recognise it, or notice it. It will pass by without remark or apparent consequence. But once it has passed there is no way to return to how things were before. You will not find any sequence of words to say that can reopen the person in front of you. They are now and forever locked away from you.

The chances are that they themselves will not have even realised it’s happened. They will still genuinely try to be there for you. But they can’t. At least not in the same way as before. Something will stop them.

They became locked away from you for their own safety and self-preservation. It will not matter if they have known you for ten months or ten years. From that point on they are unable to see you in the same way again. Your action in that moment lost them from you.

But what you gained in exchange is a darkness that has seen you clearly. In that one moment, the thought you had, the energy that washed over you, that darkness was there. And it saw you. Now, it will never leave your side again.

In the coming weeks and months as you heal, you can begin to make yourself appear the same as everyone else. A lot of the time you will feel like everyone else and day-to-day, go through the motions of life. But it will still be there at your side. That darkness. Some days right up against you, breathing down your neck. Other days you may forget it even exists at all. The people around you will never see it.

But do not become complacent on those days it feels far away. It’s patient and can be cunning, changing from something you fear to something you want to run toward. It knows you now and it has seen that unquenchable thirst, that unfillable void that sits in the pit of your stomach.