Free My Life in Darkness by Harrison Drake Page A

stay folded, stuffed into the inside pocket of my jacket, the oldest ones yellowed and worn. All I need to do is hand them to you, then I can run away like a child who’s just rung a stranger’s doorbell. I lack the strength to even do just that.
    And so I’ll talk to you, about the things that don’t matter as the words I’ve never been able to speak fill the gaps. I’ll hear your responses in my head as a chorus of mechanized wings and feet applaud us. The dreams that keep me happy, they never leave. They keep me warm as the air whips its chill through me, and they keep me company in the long days between eclipses.
    Three and a half years now I’ve been replaying fabricated memories to keep me company through the lonely nights. I wrap them around me like a blanket, clutching some tight to my chest like a stuffed animal—eyes dangling, buttons lost to the ages, stuffing bursting from worn out seams—and I sleep soundly.
    I’ll talk to you once more, but I’ll keep my feelings hidden as I always have. My ‘memories’ are all I have left, to lose them would do me nothing but harm.
    My frail bones ache with anticipation. The darkness is coming to work its way through me, to mend my tired, aged body. I will see you once more, at least once more. Five minutes and twenty-nine seconds of darkness, my beloved, it will prepare me for the long wait until I see you again.

MAY 1, 2079
     
     
    Dearest Lena,
     
    I feel pain with every step now, and I know that the end is near. The darkness has come home once more for me, one last time in Canada.
    It brought me to this world, brought me to life a century ago, and now it comes to bring me home. I don’t know where I’ll go from here, nor do I know if there will be people waiting for me. All I know is that the pain and the loneliness I feel should hopefully stop. I sense that they’ll be coming with me as well, they’ve been more active than usual, fluttering and crawling around in fast, frantic circles.
    The darkness is almost here. Two minutes and fifteen seconds… not that it matters. I’ll be gone at the moment of maximum eclipse—halfway through totality. It was at that moment that I came into this world.
    Should I find it weird that I know the exact moment of my death? It’s only minutes away and yet I’m not even scared. Mark Twain was born when Halley’s comet passed over and he said he’d “go out with it”. He died the day after it returned—seventy-five years later.
    My life is tied to the eclipses, a product of the nature of the universe, a product of timing and perfection. We exist at the time when the moon is the perfect distance from the earth as to completely blot out the sun. One day, long in the future, this magic will be gone.
    It’s fitting that it should all end here, the Bay of Fundy, a place with the highest tidal range in the world, and all for the same reason-timing. The time a wave takes to travel from the edge of the bay to the shore and back out is the same as the time between high tides.
    My hand hurts from writing all of this, but it seems important to record. For posterity, I suppose. If things had arisen differently-even by a mere fraction—none of this, none of us would exist.
    I don’t have much longer, the darkness is coming and I can feel myself slipping away. I only have a few minutes until totality comes, then from there just a minute until the point of maximum eclipse. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’ll live through this one. But I don’t think I will, I’m not sure I want to. I can feel the darkness reaching out to me and it feels like home.
    I’ve lived my life in the darkness, the hundred years in light meant nothing to me. It was the two hours, thirty-three minutes and fifty-six-point-four seconds that I spent in the shadows that gave meaning to my life, that gave me a reason to go on.
    That, and you of course.
    Don’t mourn me when I’m gone. Celebrate my life, celebrate my love for you.
    Loving you was the only