The deep darkness
Watch or be watched
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When I first moved here, I would sometimes cycle home in the evening or at night. The last part of the road, uphill, is dark. Truly dark. Only one side of the road is lit by streetlights, the other side disappears into shadow. In that black void, hidden behind fences, lie the dunes.
I was overwhelmed by that darkness the first time. Saying it surprised me would be too mild. Surprised sounds too light, too breezy. And I was afraid. Truly afraid in the dark.
What for exactly? I couldn’t say. But the feeling that danger was lurking wouldn’t leave me. Not once I was in the garden. Not when I put my bike away. Was there something rustling in the bushes behind the shed? It stuck with me: that shadowy presence, slippery and shapeless.
Very quickly, I was inside. I shut the door behind me swiftly. I hurried up the stairs. No matter how fast I moved, my steps kept feeling too slow. That sense of being chased followed me in. Even behind my own front door, it was as if the darkness had spread through the hallways of the building. In my apartment, I turned on every light. I tried to calm my body with a cup of tea. Only under the warm shower did I truly relax. There, at last, I could wash the darkness off me.
Lying in my bed I wondered: what was thát?
The next morning, in broad daylight, everything felt familiar again. The road, the hill, the dunes. Nothing scary about it. Apparently, it was something the darkness did to the surroundings. Or rather, to me.
Why does the night here feel so different from the city? Is it the streetlights that keep the streets from ever going completely dark? Is it the sheer number of people living noisily, the sense that someone is always awake? The city never truly falls silent.
But complete silence — you won’t find that here either. The dunes never sleep. Even at night, you can hear them. A kind of silence, but not quite. The air fills with small dune sounds: rustling leaves, scurrying creatures, insects. Was that a twig snapping?
If no one is there, then there's no one to be afraid of. But how can you be sure? That no one is there, when you're cycling through the dark, surrounded by shadow and blackness. Being more alert in the dark than in the light is natural: when one sense dims, another takes over. There's nothing wrong with alertness, but this was more than just being on my guard. It made me realize I wasn't afraid in the dark, but of the dark. Of the unknown.
I decided (and felt very brave): I will overcome this. Next time, I wanted to try surrendering completely to the darkness, to wallow in that murky soup of unease. Slowing down instead of rushing. Because what was I really trying to escape?
I cycled slowly for the last stretch. I focused on my breathing. My heart was pounding disproportionately hard. Or did it only feel that way because of the silence?
Almost home — at the top of the hill and the peak of my feelings — I felt it again: someone was watching me. I fixed my gaze on a spot in the darkness. First I saw white tails, then the bodies they belonged to. Two deer. They’d been watching me all along.
‘Hey…’ I whispered. Whoosh, and they were gone.
Ever since then, I’ve known: when I feel like I’m being watched, I usually am. It’s just that my peeping neighbours out here are always one step ahead. They’ve already seen and sized me up while I’m still squinting into the dark. Deer, toads, hedgehogs, birds, squirrels and mice: sharp-eyed and invisible. They scurry off, spread their wings or make a run for it the moment I lay eyes on them.
But afraid of the dark? Not anymore.
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✶ New in the archive: the first story in my slow-growing series with the working title Here. Life is a changething. A glimpse of life in this place, among my animal and planty neighbours, and learning to accept the ever-changing nature of things. Seen through a natural lens.
✦ Images from the precious matters personal collection, now part of this growing archive. A lifetime of small moments, gathered with care: fragments of a soft universe in the making.
✧ Dutch for beginners
A self-invented Dutch word and portmanteau: verandering (change) + ding (thing) = veranderding (changething).
✧ Originally written in Dutch by Merel Slootheer. Translated with care and intuition by Blackbird Ditchlord.