Hiding in the Light
He sits up alone and DVD after DVD goes into the machine. The images flicker over his face without any of them going in and he has long since lost track of what he has watched. It stopped being about the stories a long time ago.
He tells himself he has insomnia. But insomnia is involuntary, the inability to sleep rather than the lack of desire. He just doesn’t want to sleep; because that’s when the dreams come.
But it’s more than that. He doesn’t want the dark to come; doesn’t want the sounds to stop. Because when it goes quiet and when the lights go then the knowledge comes.
As long as it stays light he can pretend. Pretend he is someone different, pretend it isn’t really him that has brought about the beginning of the end. He can ignore how dreadfully he has let the Professor down, let Abby down, let everyone down. He can hide from the fact that Helen had been right all along; that she knew what would come.
When there is noise and light he can push away the feeling that she killed the wrong person and that it should have been him. It should have been him.
He wishes now that she had killed him. He wishes someone else would. He wishes he had the guts to do it himself.
But he doesn’t and no one else will because they still think that he can save them again; that he can mend it, fix it, pick up the shattered pieces of the universe and put them all back together again.
Only he knows he can’t, but it’s another thing he can pretend. Another thing that he can refuse to admit to himself. And just one more thing he hides from everyone else.
So he keeps the lights on and keeps the sound loud because he can no longer escape himself in the dark.