nyctophilia

Night has always been the only place  

that doesn’t ask me to perform.  

It holds me the way old forests do —  

with a hush that feels ancestral,  

with a darkness that doesn’t punish,  

only absorbs.  

I walk through it like a revenant  

returning to familiar soil,  

letting the shadows braid themselves  

into my breath.  

There’s a strange mercy in the dark —  

a kind of feral acceptance  

that daylight has never offered me.  

People think loving the night is a wound,  

a symptom,  

a softness gone wrong.  

But they don’t understand  

how exhausting it is to be visible,  

how heavy the world becomes  

when every room demands a version of you  

that doesn’t ache.  

In the dark, I am not curated.  

I am not deciphered.  

I am not a story someone is trying to fix.  

I am simply a pulse moving through quiet,  

a creature unobserved,  

a body allowed to exist  

without translation.  

The night doesn’t heal me —  

it just stops hurting me,  

and sometimes that’s enough  

to feel like salvation.

-𝕃ℝ 🖤