The Return of Darkness
by Tony L. Hunter
It didn’t knock.
It never does.
Darkness knows its way in—
through the same cracked places
I once tried to seal
with hope and habit,
faith and forgetfulness.
It returned
like an old friend with bad news,
not loud,
just certain—
its shadow stretching
across the threshold of my soul
like it never left.
I felt it first
in the quiet things:
the way morning light
suddenly felt too sharp,
how the coffee went cold
but I kept drinking it anyway,
as if bitter was all I deserved.
The return of darkness
isn’t a crash—
it’s a settling.
A slow unmaking
of the person I stitched together
after last time.
It doesn’t scream.
It whispers,
and the whispers
sound like truth:
“You failed her.”
“She’s not proud of you.”
“You should’ve known.”
“You should’ve seen it sooner.”
And God—
how those words
fit too well in my mouth,
like a language
I swore I forgot
but still speak fluently
in the dark.
I whisper In the dark
I will always wonder if I could have saved you.
I tried to reason with it.
Tried to drown it in ritual,
in prayer,
in reminders that I’m still here—
but it just smiled,
sat beside me,
and handed me your absence
like a letter
I never wanted to open.
It doesn’t argue.
It waits.
It watches.
It knows grief wears new faces,
but the eyes are always mine.
And yet—
within the black,
beneath the ache,
there’s something almost sacred
in the way it holds me when I lie awake.
Not gently,
but completely.
It reminds me
she was real.
That love like that
leaves a scar
that glows sometimes
in moonlight
when you’re quiet enough
to let it.
So here it is—
the return of darkness.
Not as a punishment,
but a presence.
Not to steal her from me again,
but to remind me
she was never truly gone.
Only transformed.
Like light turned inward.
Like love
with nowhere else to go
but back into the wound
where it was born.
