We’re All Coming Home in the Dark
Navigating the line between writing dark stories and everyone’s desire for a happy ending.
Life would be easier, I think, if I wrote happy stories. If I were anesthetized. If I brushed up that resume and preened through the interviews and said, yes, oh, yes, my only goal in life is to devise strategies to trick people into buying garbage they don’t need while our planet slowly cinders. Like water coming to a boil. Life would be easier if I took a higher dose of anti-depressants. If I left my moral compass at the door and penned tutorials about how you too can make a million dollars a month selling assembly-line prose — all while dressed in your Willy Loman wares. Life would be easier, I think, if I opened the blinds, the windows, the screens, and let it all the light until I’m burned by it.
All the things that used to be inside of me…now they’re outside. But the inside of me is empty, a character laments in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpiece Cure. I think of those lines often. Over the years I’ve tried to crack the words open and sift through its parts only to find a clean nothingness. Maybe I should’ve appreciated the art for what it was instead of trying to give it layers and layers of meaning.
Before anti-depressants, I couldn’t see a bottom. My job as a writer was to burrow…
