Tenebrae

I didn’t know the darkness would still find me. Not after this long. Not after the years I spent dragging myself toward something that resembled light. I had once believed it was a choice, whether to stay in the warmth of what I’d built or to go back. I thought the tunnels had edges. Borders. Entry points I could refuse. But darkness isn’t directional. It moves underneath. It waits for stillness. It knows how to find you again.

There are paths inside it. That’s the part no one tells you. You think it’s a single descent. One long corridor you either survive or avoid. But there are turns. Variations. Routes that resemble healing until you realize you’ve looped back to the beginning. And no one chooses that. No one recreates the night on purpose. But you follow something. An image. A sound. A memory with no context. And by the time you notice, the walls have closed again.

Some animals evolve entirely in darkness. Cave fish, for instance, lose their eyes over generations. In the absence of light, vision offers no advantage, so the body reallocates its resources. Sensory energy moves elsewhere. Toward vibration. Pressure. Chemical traces in the water. What’s striking is the permanence of it, more than the loss itself. Even if light is reintroduced, the eyes do not reappear. The organism is not waiting to see again. It has reorganized itself around a different reality. Darkness, in this case, is not an interruption. It is the condition that entrained the nervous system. The animal does not experience deprivation. It experiences attunement.

Grief is like this. It behaves like an environment the body adapts to over time. It doesn’t function as something you move through and outgrow. At first, you expect your old senses to return, the ones that belonged to your life before death. You wait for bearing, for the moment when light feels usable again. But grief does not restore what it alters. It reorganizes perception. You learn to navigate by pressure rather than vision, by nearness rather than horizon, by what you can detect in the dark without language. This is why arrival is so disorienting. Even when light comes back, the body does not revert. It has already learned another way of moving through the world.

My body adjusted before I could form a coherent account of what was happening to me, which is perhaps its subtlest cruelty. Sleep no longer arrived as a reliable sequence but as something provisional, negotiated in increments. Hunger appeared without instruction. I woke already tired, the fatigue coming from the effort of remaining intact rather than from exertion. Breathing felt constrained, as though the body had quietly revised its expectations about air. I was walking one afternoon with no destination in mind when the light shifted. It struck in a way I knew too well, dropping into the street and pooling on the pavement before slipping away. It caught the world the way it used to when he was still here. I recognized it at once. My chest tightened to the point of pain. My vision blurred. I stopped where I was because forward motion no longer seemed possible. It wasn’t memory as recollection. It was presence. The certainty of him, suddenly whole, arriving inside a body that could not accommodate it. I stood there struggling to breathe, aware only of the pressure, the narrowing, the recognition that something essential had been taken and then handed back all at once, without warning, without mercy.

Latin has words for states like this that English tends to reduce. Tenebrae names darkness as something active, enveloping, not merely the absence of light. Lumen suggests illumination as substance rather than metaphor, something that enters, withdraws, re-emerges unevenly. Memoria does not mean recollection as we understand it, but a faculty of the mind defined by obligation, by what insists on being carried forward. And gravis, the root of grief, describes weight before it describes feeling. What draws me to these words is their accuracy; elegance feels incidental. They do not promise resolution. They describe conditions. They articulate the matrix in which perception aligns itself. They create a semantic threshold where experience stops being formless.

In my mind, the scene surfaces with brutal clarity. Sterile walls that seem to bleach the air itself, hospital lights that flash and stutter overhead, too bright to look at directly yet impossible to escape. Everything is white, then blue, then white again. I see bodies moving without faces. Hands and sleeves. The swift choreography of people who know exactly what to do while I stand inside the wrong reality. Sirens still live in the background of it. Shrill. Metallic. Then the doors and the abrupt halt. Inside the room there is a different sound, relentless and mechanical. The monitor’s sharp metronome, the long tone that threatens, the hiss of oxygen, the wet click of suction, the thin plastic rattle of tubing when someone shifts him. The clock on the wall keeps counting in its own indifferent rhythm. Each second elongated. Suspended and languid. As if time has turned viscous. I remember the way my breath felt trapped behind my ribs. How my skin went cold. My mind kept trying to make the scene rearrange itself into something survivable. Underneath it all was the terrible intimacy of sound. The hard effort of the room trying to keep my son alive.

Time in medicine is treated as a measurable substance. Seconds matter. Interventions have windows. The body is read in numbers and intervals, and everyone in that room is trained to believe that if they act quickly enough, time can be negotiated. But grief does something else with it. It slows it. It splinters it. It turns it into an element you breathe in, whether you want to or not.

One of the loneliest discoveries of grief is that it changes your metaphysics. Before loss, you live with an unspoken confidence that life is arranged to continue; that tomorrow is, in some fundamental way, a reasonable expectation. After loss, the mind cannot revert to that innocence. It becomes aware of contingency with a new intimacy, the way a person becomes aware of gravity after a fall. This awareness does not feel like drama. It feels like knowledge. You can still participate in life, still work, still love, still laugh, but you do so with an altered understanding of what reality permits. People call this resilience. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is simply compliance with a world that has already shown you what it is capable of.

This is why grief rarely resolves into a clean story. It resists the tidy arc we prefer to assign it, the one where pain produces wisdom and wisdom produces peace. Some losses do not educate; they merely reveal. They show you what the mind had been protecting you from: the extent of your dependence on what you cannot control. In the aftermath, you become fluent in contradiction. You want to trust life again, and you cannot. You want to build a future, and you understand too much about how easily futures are dismantled. The achievement is not optimism. The achievement is continuing to love and to choose, remaining open to intimacy, even while knowing with complete certainty how vulnerable intimacy makes you.

In the end, grief does not only break the heart. It breaks the mind’s faith in fairness. You look back and see how little of life was ever guaranteed, how much of what you loved was held by chance. The world continues to speak in the language of deserving. Grief teaches a different language. It teaches that catastrophe does not require a reason.