It was early February, and the snow that had collected over the past month had disappeared under a wave of torrential rain, leaving only sheets of ice and slush around the streets as a sign that it was ever there.
My friend and I were leaving our other friend’s dorm at Totem Park. It was sometime around two in the morning. Campus at that hour, with its eerily empty streets and harsh, artificial lights dotted around the pavement, seemed more like a miniature set for a 1970s sci-fi movie than a real place.
I looked up at the sky. I hated doing that at night. Its dark vastness was barren, except for the large swaths of clouds, composed of tiny water droplets which formed something larger than myself — it made me uncomfortable. Maybe it was rooted in the age-old fear of the dark. Maybe I couldn’t bring myself to comprehend my minisculeness. Either way, I wanted to go home.
But it was then that my friend spotted a growing mass of gas in the distant sky, beyond the buildings and streets that we could see. This wasn’t a cloud. It was coming up from somewhere on the ground, and it kept building and billowing upward into the abyss of the night sky.
We deliberated among ourselves as to what the mass was. We settled on a possibility: there was a house burning someplace close. We now had to go and see if anyone was in danger. It was better, we decided, to check where the smoke was coming from rather than not, in case our suspicions really did turn out to be true.
So we set off on our journey to what might as well have been a distant and unknown land — but it was our campus, a place that was intensely familiar to us during the day.
I held on to my cheap and shoddy umbrella I got from the drugstore, which was held together only by my silent prayers. Every gust of wind threatened to snap it inside out. I held it diagonally to protect it from the wind, covering my face and looking at my shoes for guidance.
We continued along the path to the smoke, gingerly stepping over puddles and ice. My sneakers, ill-fit for the environment, were filling up with water. I only lifted my umbrella a few times to take a quick peek at where we were.
We walked past my dorm building. The ground floor lighting was blaring offensively, illuminating an empty front desk with no signs of life. Compared to the daytime when residents and staff came in and out or delivery people dropped by with fast food and Amazon packages, it looked abandoned — desolate even.
As I took in the stillness that surrounded me, I had to ask myself, What the hell am I doing?
But I couldn’t ponder anything for too long. There was no time.
We were almost on Agronomy Road, and we had yet to see the burning house. We reached a point on Main Mall where the rain had collected in deep puddles over mounds of ice. I tried my best to not slip. We crossed over to the other street.
Nearly there.
We finally closed in on the cloud of smoke. We had found the burning house: the smoke was just coming from a vent in a lab building. Nothing appeared wrong. Nothing was burning.
We walked back the way we came. I couldn’t help but be mildly disappointed by the anti-climactic ending. How could we ever think that our imaginations were congruent with reality?
It seems rather ridiculous in retrospect. But underneath the miserable rain and in between the harsh, biting winds and the hopelessly infinite black sky, perhaps there was something that gave us an impetus to imagine the burning house.
We were isolated in that place, at that time, and there was something haunting and lonely about being there. But the possibilities of the unknown spread out before us and let us think in ways we could not fathom under the liveliness of the day.
There is something intuitively terrifying about the dark. It’s the reason why, during the night, we dream up monsters in our room as children, why we dash up the stairs when we turn off the downstairs light and why we tell each other stories of creatures hiding in dark places around a campfire.
Our senses peak in the dark. Any breath, any sound, any aberration, are grounds for fear and suspicion. We are scared of what we don’t know. And the dark is a paragon of that which we don’t know.
It surrounds and embraces us as we go to sleep. We close our eyes, even for just a few seconds, to find peace of mind and disengage from the world. It gives us a sense of privacy and security.
I think of a lyric from Patrick Stump’s “People Never Done A Good Thing”: “You’re only free when you’re asleep.” It’s an adage I scrawled as a young teenager on my bedroom wall back home.
We are scared of the unknown, yes, but perhaps we are also attracted to it and its possibilities — nighttime is magical in that way. Free from the constraints of our structured lives during the day, we can imagine ourselves and our realities more liberally. At some point, night becomes a time where the reality of our life and the world we live in is flexible. Actuality intermixes with fantasy: it becomes difficult to tell tails from heads, the ending from the beginning, what is real from what is invented.
Maybe it’s because of this relationship to the dark that my friend and I became suspicious of that smoke cloud and came up with a terrible possibility. Maybe it’s why humans from every culture have spent millennia using stories of lurking creatures in the shadows as profound warnings, that are simultaneously entertainment.
Perhaps it’s due to this relationship with the dark that so many people go to bed with their minds consumed by all kinds of imagined scenarios –– from idealizing a person in a romantic sense to envisioning their own deepest desires — in order to fall asleep.
Maybe it’s because of this relationship that when I’m on the 49 at night, barrelling down Southwest Marine Drive, I squint my eyes and pretend I can travel through the cosmos, and that the bus is a vessel and the cars’ headlights are stars. I imagine I am travelling unimaginably fast to an unknown location, far from Earth. It is, somehow, comforting.
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