The Black
A reckoning disguised as ruin. A mercy mistaken for madness.
She entered without sound, without pretense. Not an arrival so much as a reversion. She did not appear. She remembered herself through me. The Black. Not a mood. Not a metaphor. A state of sacred undoing. She didn’t seek praise, nor comfort. She required witness. Not approval.
They labeled her depression. I once agreed. But no. This wasn’t despair. This wasn’t chemical imbalance or misfired cognition. This was decomposition. A necessary rot. She existed before language tried to sterilize her. She arrived not to break me but to dissolve the architecture that once passed for self. What looked like death lived more honestly than most things parading as purpose.
She peeled back form. Removed structure. Fed the scaffolding of my ego to the wind. Nothing survived intact. Not my beliefs. Not my faith. Not the mask I wore even in solitude. She didn’t scream. She stared. I stared back. Something fell between us. Memory. Maybe myth.
Nothing functioned the same. Thought didn’t cohere. Emotion didn’t explain itself. Sleep forgot how to soothe. The spine sagged beneath old burdens with no names. I tried to speak. Words arrived brittle. Their shapes mocked meaning.
She required no dialogue. Only the surrender of fabrication. She asked nothing. She stripped everything. Her method, erosion. Her timing, glacial. Her intimacy—violent only to pretense. My prayers evaporated before reaching a ceiling. I suspected she removed the ceiling first.
This wasn’t emptiness. It was origin. She reached into me with the intimacy of erosion. She cracked the bedrock, pulled marrow forward, sifted bone from belief. The familiar dissolved. Calendars lost sequence. Identity untethered. Time fell sideways.
I couldn’t hurry her. She doesn’t move for urgency. She watches for stillness. I stopped reaching. I stopped naming. I learned to sit inside unknowing without narrative. She respected that.
The world kept spinning. Emails continued. Invitations arrived. I couldn’t explain why none of it made contact. The Black had pulled the plug on performance. The life I once tended like a stage set now looked like rubble from a myth I never chose.
She did not promise rebirth. That isn’t her jurisdiction. She presides over ruins. She patrols the in-between. She speaks fluently in ache, in silence, in pulse without context. She removes the need for metaphors by becoming the thing itself.
They told me to fight her. They suggested remedies, distractions, paths toward light. But the light felt cheap. Artificial. She wasn’t shadow needing escape. She was threshold. And thresholds demand reverence, not rescue.
In time, not chronological time, but the time the body keeps, I noticed breath again. Not joy. Not clarity. Just breath. Honest and undecorated. She allowed it. Not as reward. As rhythm.
When she left, nothing marked her exit. No new belief. No sudden epiphany. Only the weightlessness of not having to pretend. Only the quiet dignity of ruin inhabited without apology.
She does not wave farewell. She removes her presence the way night gives itself back to morning. I no longer needed her to stay. I no longer needed myself to return.
I emerged not as phoenix, but as soil. Rich with the sediment of endings. Ready. Not hopeful. Not inspired. Just ready.
If The Black arrives, let her stay. Do not diagnose her. Do not name her sorrow. Do not force her into metaphor. Sit. Bleed what must be bled. Lose what must be lost. Let your identity mulch. Let silence unmake you.
She will not save you. She will not guide you. But she will remove everything that no longer serves your becoming.
The dark night of the soul strips everything false, then waits to see what still breathes.
And that is her mercy.
Signed, the one who rose as soil, not story.
"The dark night of the soul strips everything false, then waits to see what still breathe
s."