Who’s Afraid of the Dark?
There is no witness.
The stars burn and die without memory. The galaxies turn like slow storms, but not for us. They do not know we’re here.
Everything you love, your child’s voice, the warmth of a body beside you, the sound of rain on the roof, exists for an instant and then is gone. No trace, no record. Even the atoms that hold you together will scatter into space, indifferent to what they once composed.
There is no plan. No hidden architect. The universe doesn’t experience itself through you, it doesn’t experience anything at all. It expands, cools, collapses, repeats. Meaning is not lost; it was never there to begin with.
Look long enough into the dark and the difference between love and hunger, between creation and decay, begins to blur. All motion is the same motion. All warmth leaks into cold. The sun will die, and the Earth will die, and the last thought ever thought will vanish into silence.
This is what it is.
Not tragedy, just absence. A world without audience, without moral gravity, without purpose. You are a coincidence made of dust, briefly self-aware, destined to disappear.
Welcome to ground zero.
There’s no comfort in naming it. The void doesn’t answer back. You can shout God into it, or progress, or love, but it stays mute. The sound comes back thinner, like a prayer shouted into deep water.
You start to understand why people build stories. A story is a fence around the dark. Without it, everything slips. Morality, beauty, even grief, they need a listener to exist. Take the listener away and the cry becomes air moving through an empty room.
This is the part of night no one writes about. Not the poetic kind with stars and yearning, but the one where stars are just explosions and yearning is a trick of biology. The black between them is older than light. It doesn’t want you dead, it just doesn’t care.
Keep standing there. Don’t reach for a torch. The longer you stay, the clearer it gets: there was never a torch. Only eyes learning to see in the dark.
The dark doesn’t blink. It waits, patient as entropy, while your pulse hammers against the silence. You stand at the edge of your own skull, peering into the machinery: neurons firing like dying stars, chemicals masquerading as joy, fear, devotion. All of it a temporary arrangement of borrowed particles.
You once thought the horror was in the ending. But the ending is merciful, quick, final. The real terror is the middle, the endless now where you know the script is blank, yet you keep reading aloud. You invent reasons the way lungs invent breath. Not because air cares, but because the alternative is suffocation.
Watch a mother lift her child from a nightmare. Two fragile bodies clinging to each other in defiance of physics. The universe does not take note, but something happens anyway. The child’s breathing slows. The mother’s heartbeat steadies. A small warmth passes between them, useless, beautiful, unrecorded.
Call it defiance. Call it delusion. The name doesn’t matter. What matters is the heat generated by the friction between is and must be. You rub those sticks together, love, work, curiosity, spite, and a spark jumps the gap. Not eternal. Not meaningful. Just enough to see the next step.
The dark adapts. It learns your outline, the exact shape of your hunger. It whispers bargains: Give up the stories, and I’ll stop pretending to be your enemy. But you’ve seen what happens to those who agree. They become efficient, hollow, optimized for nothing. Perfectly adapted to absence.
So you keep the fracture. One eye on the abyss, one hand in the soil. You plant tomatoes that will rot before the sun swells red. You teach a child to read words that will be forgotten. You kiss a mouth that will turn to dust. Each act a quiet rebellion against physics.
This isn’t courage. Courage still hopes for applause.
This is humbler: a rhythm, a pulse, the refusal to flatline. The compulsion to mean, even when you know better. Entropy keeps perfect books. You keep forging the receipts.
Eventually, the body gives out. The last thought is small, "Where did I put my keys?", before dissolving into static. The dark closes the file. No epilogue. No judgment.
But here’s the quiet secret the void never learned: while you lasted, you were the epilogue. Every pointless kindness, every laugh that vanished in air, every note hummed to no one, these were the universe briefly forgetting its own rules. A glitch in the code of indifference.
The stars won’t remember. The galaxies won’t care. But for one rotation of a pale blue dot, something that shouldn’t have mattered did. Not to the cosmos. To the small, warm constellation of lives that brushed against yours.
That’s the whole con. The dark wins every round, but you win the moments in between. And moments, stacked stubbornly enough, become a life. Keep going. Upright.
“Who’s Afraid of the Dark?” isn’t a riddle to solve or a dare to shout into the void.
It’s a quiet question we keep asking ourselves. The answer isn’t to chase the light or deny the dark, but to live inside it with open eyes.
To keep making small warmths against the cold, even knowing they fade.
To love, to build, to care, because it doesn’t matter, and precisely because of that, it matters to us completely.
This is what remains after meaning collapses, the stubborn human act of building it back again.