Seeing in the dark

The sun has returned and I'm weirdly sad about it

It’s mid-February and sunlight is fast returning to Anchorage. It peeks out from under my window shades on weekend mornings and lingers in the post-work dusk. It hums in the sky even behind this thick layer of snow clouds. It reflects and softens and knocks on the door with its wide cheeky grin and says, hey, how are you, let’s go do something.

I’ve been waiting so long for it. I’ve endured the hardest season, that long northern fall when each day shortens in leaps. I guarded myself against the worst of the dark days’ effects: five hours of low-angle daylight can, and does, mess with your brain.

I hunkered down through to winter solstice and after that I calmly waited, knowing each day was growing brighter one minute at a time. I waited so long for the sunlight to return. But now that it’s here? I miss the dark.

Sunlight on snow is magic. 35mm in Anchorage, AK, Winter 2022-23.

This happens every year. For most of my life I’ve felt perpetually late to the party. Change is hard! By the time I finally give in and become comfortable with something new—in this case, the dark season of winter—it seems the world’s already moved on.

I was finally getting used to the darkness. It held me safe, wrapped in a blanket on a couch. Truthfully, that’s where I spent many a dark day: wrapped in a blanket on the couch. That’s a big part of the beauty of this season. A necessary winter rest.

Now that the light is back I find myself clinging to remnants of darkness. Let me stay in bed, let me drink tea and sit in a bath. Let me write and dream and read and play mindless card games while I listen to a podcast. Let my energy be low, and let my surroundings mirror me in their own hibernation. Let me not move too quickly into this next phase.

Spring’s mania comes fast and with it a total loss of the rest and reflection in winter. I’ve finally grown comfortable with my winter repose. I’ve found a rhythm, found comfort in the anonymity of night. There are parts of me that feel safe emerging in the dark. We’ve developed a rapport, me and those dark spaces. What will happen when they meet the light? Will they retreat into the depths? Will we have to say goodbye?

As I process this moment I’m noticing two things. First is the familiar sweetness of anticipation. One of my favorite parts of going on vacation happens before I even leave for the trip. No matter how good the vacation is, my excitement and planning, dreaming and researching nearly always rivals the peak enjoyment of the trip itself. Similarly, my anticipation of the light’s return is perhaps just as, if not more, enjoyable, more sustaining in its hopefulness, than the sunlight itself.

The other aspect is harder to describe. It has to do with sadness, maybe a tiny bit of regret, at not having fully given in to the darkest of days while I had the chance. The realization that fear, more than courage, guided me in how I spent the darkest of days. I’d like to call it necessary self-preservation: I know I’m at risk of seasonal affective disorder and plain old depression, and I did what I could to prevent those from overly disrupting my life. I went into survival mode—a place I know well.

I don’t regret taking care of myself. Not at all. But there’s a part of me that wonders what it would be like to truly surrender to the darkness, to let it eat me up. What would happen in that space? What would I find in that long winter night? Now that it’s on its way out, I feel like I’ve missed my chance.

Relevant anecdote about a moose

There’s recently been an aggressive female moose at one of the nearby dog parks. It’s called a park but it’s really just a large semi-wooded area surrounding a bog. The dog bog, if you will. It’s one of Osiris’s favorite places. We hadn’t been there in a bit, and I was surprised on a recent visit to see signs posted about this moose who’d taken up residence and charged at several dogs.

“MOOSE ALERT! 2/6/23 Aggressive moose cow [with calf?] Last seen near the first turn to the lake USE EXTREME CAUTION”

There were a few other people at the park, and I asked if any had seen the moose that night. They said no, so we kept walking.

It’s taken a while for me to admit that I love the feeling of being on guard, of having to pay attention to my surroundings. Perhaps it started as a teenager walking around Brooklyn late at night, keys pressed between my fingers. That’s a sadder version of vigilance: a mistrust for fellow humans.

I’d like to think I live a healthier version of it now. Listening and watching for signs of bears while on summer hikes. Paying attention to avalanche conditions on winter ski days. And on a recent nighttime visit to the dog bog, scanning the woods for a big dark aggressive blob atop long spindly legs.

We weren’t doing anything reckless by continuing our walk. I trust this dog not to chase moose, and no one had seen the cow that night. So we walked mostly in silence, the air crackling with the knowledge that, somewhere in those trees, might be an angry, ornery, freight train on stilts.

It wasn’t until we were almost all the way around the bog that I saw her, standing against the trees on the far side of the clearing, nibbling on a bare branch. What a relief! Now that we’d seen her she was no longer an omnipotent threat, no longer lurking around each turn in the trail. From far away she became just another moose.

And as much as I was happy to not worry about startling her, to know that Osiris and I would be safe from at least that one threat, I was also a little bit sad. Because for the remainder of the walk the air no longer crackled. After we saw her, the tension dropped. Once again we were on just another ordinary walk.

The flip side of anticipation is that our fears, too, are often worse in our imagination than in reality. Apparently that’s what anxiety is: this endless looping of scary scenarios that’s played in my head since as long as I can remember.

Maybe part of why I’m sad to say goodbye to the dark is that, now that I’ve sunk into it, I’ve realized it wasn’t so scary after all. It was scariest in my mind, scariest in those October and November weeks when all I could do was think ahead to how much worse things would be in December.

There’s a relief in getting through the tough thing, a relief in finally seeing the moose. But along with that relief comes the realization that there was something good about the scary part. That by facing the fear, however imperfectly, there was a chance to expand my own capacity.

It turns out I might need the dark days just as much as I need the light. The darkness shapes this world and is part of it, just as much as me, or you, or any old aggressive moose.

Hope you have a great sun-filled week, however you may feel about it.

-Julia

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