Aversion

I love writing essays and think pieces, but my favorite type of writing is fiction, especially short stories. I've been working on a few short stories recently and to keep you occupied while I get in the depths of my creativity, I am sharing a story I wrote a few years ago. 

I asked myself a simple question. What if a girl's fear of the dark took a sinister turn?

Aversion is the answer to that question. Enjoy! 

Part 1

“Leave the light on, please”.

She was only three years old when her fear of darkness began to settle in her. At first everyone thought she was just being a child; many children have been afraid of the dark, and she was no different. Her mother kept every window open to allow natural light in the house, and the moment the sun went down, three lights were turned on to combat her fear. For bedtime twenty night-lights flickered on, with multiple lights in some rooms. The house was a year-round Christmas light show, and she was always happy.

When her mother decided at age ten that she should outgrow her fear, all the lights were cut off. She screamed, cried, and slept for only twenty minutes that night; the darkness was too much to handle. But her mother had decided that enough was enough, and if she did not cut her daughter off now, she would spend her life’s savings on lights. After her mother explained the situation to her three days later, she agreed that she needed to get over her fear. And so she did, sort of. The darkness was something she still feared, but she formed new coping mechanisms towards it. When every light in the house went off, she condemned the dark, but promised to herself to never let it infiltrate her. That promise alone got her through the night.

The sweet sixteen her mother threw for her was the earliest start of a party ever thrown (9am!) and when her mother asked why so early, she responded by telling her mother that angels can only protect when they can see clearly because darkness could not comprehend her. Her mother thought nothing of the peculiar and religious statement, because at sixteen her daughter was finally not afraid of the dark. And three months prior, all of the nightlights were thrown away.

It was at seventeen years old when she got her first boyfriend. He was pale as crisp winter snow and he had Caribbean seas as eyes. When he touched her, she felt that he was a gift from God, meant to cleanse her soul and life of the darkness around her. She began to spend her every moment with him, and when her mother asked for just a little mother daughter time she scoffed and walked away. Rebellion was her mother’s explanation. But when other family members heard, they became concerned.

Five months later, she allowed her boyfriend to enter her body and she remembered the promise she made to herself seven years prior. She had not let darkness infiltrate her; in fact she had let light and love inside of her! She had given herself the ultimate Christmas gift. She could not wait to tell her friends about the experience she had.

It was Christmas dinner, which she was forced to attend, when her cousin asked her why the only people she ever hung out with were white. While everyone at the table awaited her response, she got up to exit the room. But before she left she said,

“Because they are simply better.”

Her mother was devastated. What did she do to make her daughter believe that white people were better? What did she do to make her daughter hate herself? It was at that moment that her mother realized that her daughter’s fear of darkness had taken a sinister turn, had transferred from surroundings to people.

At eighteen, she attended her first therapy session and the therapist asked if she knew that she was black. She responded with,

“The devil cursed me with this skin, but I am a part of the light.”

For the following months the therapist made her hold a mirror to her face, to accept her skin and her beauty. But she already made up her mind that her melanin-coated skin was a mistake.

It was three months before her nineteenth birthday that her mother thought she made a breakthrough. She broke up with her boyfriend, stopped hanging out with her friends, and started wearing dark colors. She was finally accepting who she was and what she looked like. But what her mother did not realize was that she was depressed. And the more she accepted herself, the more she hated herself. Her mother had hope.

I did not.

Part 2

I was seventeen when my sister committed suicide. It was a month after her nineteenth birthday, during sunrise. She shot herself outside with a pistol and my mother screamed until her lungs gave out. I froze and just watched my sister’s dark blood pool out onto the grass.

Her funeral was everything she would have wanted; my mother insisted everyone wear white. I wore a black dress; I was not giving my sister anymore light. People came sobbing and besides the family, everyone at the funeral was white. Even at the end she pissed me off. I was infuriated that she took her life, that she was afraid of the truth. I was livid that she could not be brave enough to accept the melanin on her skin. And the worse part is that at the funeral, everyone kept whispering that she was mentally ill, that she could not save herself.

Well, I didn’t believe that shit, because my sister was brilliant and all she did was allow society to shape her simple fear of the dark into a full-blown obsession. She never cared that I looked up to her or that I wanted to save her. So halfway through the funeral I left, and took my darkness with me.

My mother was the worst. She became lifeless without my sister. I lost two people. My mother kept blaming herself, saying she should have seen the signs. That she should have allowed her to keep all the lights when she was little because then her fear would not have manifested into anything else. It was so sad; my mother would talk about my sister’s childhood for hours. But I knew my mother did nothing wrong, because I was raised the same as her.

Every year I watched my sister’s obsession grow. She would only allow white sheets on her bed and if you came in her room you were told to sit on the floor for fear of dirtying them. Towards the end, no one was allowed in the room anymore.

When I was five, she gave me all of her black dolls and said she no longer needed them. I asked why she needed the white ones and she said she just did. When I was fifteen, she said that our mother was ugly because she had dark skin. We didn’t speak for a week and I started to realize she had a problem. Just a few months prior to that incident, I could over hear her boyfriend saying that he loved her skin and my sister asked him to leave the room. So when my mother was searching for the answers, I told her that we both lost the battle before we knew it started. I promised her that I would make it past nineteen years old. My mother began to get better.

I went inside her room a year after her suicide. Her room was very much like her: neat, spacious, and full of light. The windows were opened and the sun shone through. Nothing was touched or moved, as she was the last one inside, because my mother could not make it past the door without crying.

For the past year I had slowly gotten over my anger for her and replaced it with pity and sorrow. She was not strong enough to deal with the consequences of allowing society to dictate who she was. She preferred ignorance to truth. But her disdain towards the dark, made me embrace it more.

As I walked around the room and bathed in her scent, I heard a crackling sound beneath me. I looked down. It was her suicide note. A note we never looked for or thought she made, because we knew the reasons for her actions. I picked it up. All the note said was:

I will see you in the light, that’s where I am headed now.

Despite everything, I hope she made it there.

And now I will welcome the darkness in.

Thanks for reading! Go check out the creative section, I posted a new story!