Shadow Kingdom

We fall in love in the wee hours. When darkness makes us feel less exposed in our vulnerabilities and laying ourselves bare feels like release. While the rest of the world lies quiet, we build a world in the shadows. The earth is whispered confidences, the sky a constellation of secrets and fantasies shared in hushed tones.

None of it is real.

Every word feels like a love letter. We share pages and pages of prose, spinning and weaving the lie bigger, tighter, binding us where we lay. Languishing in this thing feels invigorating and lush, water after a drought, touch after solitary confinement, song after silence.

The darkness asks us to believe, to dream, to reach out and hold the question timidly against our lips; could this be?

We stay up until we can’t anymore, exhausted by the intimacy and intoxicated with the lie we’ve gifted ourselves. We fall asleep in the sticky entrapment of its web, pretending it’s connection and not prison. Believing, hoping.

We can’t hide from the sun. It comes inevitably as it always does, its brightness chasing away the security of darkness we can hide in. The sun is the truth.

All the everything was nothing.

We slink to our corners again, pained, defeated. We’ll stay here, we think. We try.

But the shadows are a siren, luring us back to the black, inviting us to slip on the cloaks of the farce, and hiding the only truth to be found here; only one of us is lying.