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. 

"Somewhere that way," you point into the shadows, started by a rush of the wind, whispering against the corn.

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. 

I was always 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 hot to look at his face, as if my eyes planted on him he would know where I was.

 Instead of finding where I hid, instead 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.

"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 a 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 yelped, 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 treehouse.

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 treehouse, and for a moment, a bit of gray seemed to shift, almost like a cloud becoming a dark rainstorm. I watched carefully as it flowed like the foggy mornings I loved so much, because it meant to school delay and less time at school that day.

My brother reappeared, squinting into the shadows of the treehouse, he was armed with a vortex and launched it as hard as he could into the void of the treehouse. "I sad you are a cheater! Come down now!"

As the Vortex swirled into the spectral cloud lingering in the tree house, it dissipated. Dispersed into a million bits of nothingness. I chose that moment to jump out from behind the bush.

"I'm right here! Gotcha!"

My brother turned to face me, his face unreadable, white, his eyes darted.

"Did you see it too?" He asked.

"I did see something."

"Let's go inside, I think I'm done playing for the night," he said quietly, the ambition gone from his voice. While I was the oldest, he was the clear leader of the group, especially when the cousins were around.

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."