*Caterina*
When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark.
No, it was more accurate to say I was scared of the night. Mom used to tell anyone around how cute it was that her little girl was scared of the monsters under the bed and the shadows that moved across the walls, but that wasn’t what I had been afraid of.
Shadows didn’t scare me. They were friends that my father would puppet with his hands across the walls, making up stories together before bed. I didn’t fear monsters, either. They were fuzzy with googly eyes and taught me lessons about kindness and safety on TV.
No, I was never afraid of the dark.
It was the nighttime that I feared—the moment when the sky began to darken and the sun disappeared, where the colors turned into shades of dark blues and purples, and to me, as a wide-eyed innocent girl, it seemed like the world turned into something wrong.
It was like everything was replaced with something that just wasn’t quite what it should be.
