I walked into the dark
like a man returning to a house
everyone swore would kill him.
They warned me about the shadows
like I had not already slept beside them,
like I had not already learned
the language of teeth,
the grammar of grief,
the slow and holy dialect
of surviving what should have buried me.
I know darkness.
Not the costume.
Not the poetry people wear
when they want pain to look beautiful.
I mean the real thing.
The bottomless kind.
The kind that strips your name
down to nerve and memory.
The kind that asks,
with a grin sharp as broken glass,
"Now that everything false is gone,
who are you?"
And I answered.
Not all at once.
Not bravely.
Not clean.
I answered in shaking breaths,
in nights I thought would never end,
in mornings I did not ask for
but somehow lived to see.
I answered with scar tissue.
With honesty.
With the wreckage
I could no longer pretend wasn't mine.
That is where I found it.
My light.
Not in comfort.
Not in applause.
Not in some polished heaven
handed to me by people
who never bled for their beliefs.
I found my light
down in the pit
where masks rot,
where ego starves,
where every lie I told myself
lost its voice.
I found it in the place
everybody told me to fear.
Because the dark did not destroy me.
It revealed me.
It burned off everything
that could not stand in truth.
It took my pride,
my illusions,
my need to be understood
by people still hiding from themselves.
And when it was done,
there I was.
Not perfect.
Not innocent.
But real.
Glowing different.
The light in me
was never fragile.
It was forged.
Tempered in sorrow,
sharpened in silence,
fed by every moment
I should have disappeared
but didn't.
So when I speak of darkness,
understand me clearly,
I do not praise suffering.
I praise what was born in me
because I survived it.
I found God there.
Not as thunder from the sky,
not as a voice outside myself,
but as a fire
that refused to go out
even when I had every reason
to let it.
That fire is mine now.
That light is mine now.
And I carry it
like a blade,
like a lantern,
like a promise.
So no,
I do not curse the dark.
It was the black soil
that taught my soul
how to bloom.