Scotoma

Darkness is not a mass, it is the partial or whole vacuum of its sister - light. When you're looking at a dark place, the dark is not directly obscuring your vision. Rather, it is obscuring your eyes’ ability to make out details via suppressing the quantity of light that bounces off of the surface you're observing and makes it to your eyes where that lights’s pattern will be subsequently flipped and fed to you.

Nothing can appear truly black to you, you will always see a blurry dance across your vision. A byproduct of your eyes desperately dilating and searching for any information, as the unknown is deemed as an indirect threat to you by your mind.

This is what I can see in my room now. My view swims, a chaotic fuzzy dance of a blue deep beneath the sea and its sister. She is dampened, suppressed, the ocean swallows her oh so gently.

The vague outline of the white cabinet and entertainment section in my living room is revealed to me as she grows subtly, my eyes straining harder to make out shapes.

I rub them with a quiet grunt as I squint too hard causing my labored cells to alert the brain of phantom, immaculate images and patterns in their search for her.

The moment my eyelids retreat, her face flashes brightly in the corner of my vision. I wince at the assault on my retinas and shut my eyes in momentary panic. They protest, phosphenes melding together to form a shattered memory of her face that bounces, yet simultaneously looms ahead. Who am I to deny them such joy? The better my closed eyes track her afterimage, the further it moves to the right before ebbing entirely.

All I remember is a clear expression of immense pain and terror, her hollow yet glossy eyes wide and as desperate as mine, like someone who had died of a stroke knowing they were alone in their home - hopeless.

Alas, a warm light radiates ahead of me, softened by the thin veil of skin guarding my eyes. She embraces me entirely as I fail to somehow shut my eyes harder, survival instincts dominating common sense, akin to her face. Not a sound is heard throughout all of this. It is not dying, it is no longer hiding her.

I open my eyes.