Hello Darkness My Old Friend

I can't recall a time in my life when I was afraid of the dark.

When you live in the "country", and away from light pollution, you experience a sort of darkness most never get to appreciate. It's comforting in a way, a sweet embrace and respite from the world of unnatural lighting.

In the dark, stillness is often a misunderstanding, and its easy to get jumpy at every unseeable sound.

In the middle of nowhere, sound is purposeful, tactful, and so potent, that I know what a snake sounds like as it slithers through dried grass. I can pick out the footsteps of a human versus a deer. Cricket or cicada or katydid? I can tell which is which in the pitch blackness.

Somewhere-that-way, I've had past friends yelp and point into the shadows when visiting my parents farm after dusk, startled by a rush of the wind whispering against the cornstalks. I assure them, its just the breeze making its nightly rounds.

As a fairly feral child, my siblings and I spent hours playing hide and seek, and if the cousins were over for a visit, these festivities continued past dusk. There, in the slivers of moonlight, we'd play a game I call Reverse Hide and Seek. One person hides, and the objective is to find that person quietly, and then hide with them, slipping away into the shadows while the rest continue to search.

I loved this game, as its forces you to hone a strange sort of cunning. As you slink around, attempting to "find" the hider and then stealthily tuck yourself in with them, you become hyper aware of your surroundings and your ears and eyes unlock new levels of perception.

As the person that invented the game, and having played it the longest, I had become the best hider, and when it was my turn I knew all the secret spots that were a little to obvious, yet, with a touch of shadow, no one was likely to find me. 

On one of these such occasions, I had slid behind an overgrown hedge bush that butted up to the southwest corner on the house. It wasn't a big bush, and with the right angling, I disappeared seamlessly into the dark.

If someone were to find me first, it was usually my brother, as we had a sort of non-verbal connection and intuition about things from years of hazardous living.  As I stayed silent in my little hiding spot, my brother stopped about ten feet away from where I hid, and I made sure not to look at his face, as if my eyes planted on him he would know where I was.

 Instead of finding where I hid, he yelled at the top of his lung towards the tree house. It was a sort of ramshackle tree house, but it was over 20 feet in the air, with a ladder that was missing rungs and had protruding nails from years of disrepair.

"You aren't allowed to hide up there, we already made that rule! Come down, you lose!" He yelled.

The rest of the cousins, and my sister, rallied around the treehouse as I watched carefully from my hiding spot.

"I see you, come down!" My brother yelled again.

The group was silent for a moment, then my eldest cousin Alex spoke up. "She's up there right? Are we all seeing the same thing?"

Suddenly the group screamed, and everyone dashed off in different directions. As a person that has a hard time admitting defeat, I stayed hidden, and chanced a glance towards the tree house.

Country nights are dark-dark sometimes, that even shadows seem to have a depth to them. Some might move in unnatural ways, or trick you into thinking you see something that's not quite there.

I squinted hard into the darkness of the tree house, and for a moment, a bit of gray seemed to shift, almost like a friendly cloud becoming a darkened rainstorm. I watched carefully as it flowed gently like the foggy mornings I loved so much. But it was not the right time for fog, nor was that sort of mist usually solitary.

My brother reappeared, glaring into the shadows of the tree house. He was armed with a Vortex and launched it as hard as he could into the void where he thought I hid. 

"I sad you are a cheater! Come down now!"

As the Vortex whistled violently through the air and zipped through the spectral cloud lingering in the tree house--it suddenly dissipated--dispersed into a million bits of nothingness. I chose that moment to jump out from behind the bush.

"I'm right here! Gotcha!"

Unstartled, but clearly bothered, my brother turned to face me slowly, his face unreadable and white, his eyes darted.

"Did you see it too?" He asked and pointed over his shoulder a little too calmly.

"I did see something."

"Let's go inside, I think I'm done playing for the night," he said quietly, the previous ambition to thwart his older sister's supposed shenanigan, gone from his voice. While I was the oldest, he was the clear leader of the group, especially when the cousins were around. Everyone else made their way inside as soon as he did.

I followed him into the house, and we briefly told the adults the story. They listened intently, but then laughed lightly. 

My uncle said, "this is an old house, there are bound to be some visitors around here. Its probably family ghosts, they want to see what their descendants are up to."