Darkness. It predates all other fears, and it is their mother and queen. Before we were even conceived, we were in the darkness of the womb, in the same way that future nebulas, then stars, then planets were mere pinpricks in that vast expanse of space.

We are born of the mother darkness, into a brilliant existence with a warm sun, a silver moon, the rich earth beneath our feet and wind in our hair, a lifeful of light and color.

And we see the light, the joy and saddness and breadth of it all, and we know.

Into the darkness, we will return.

And we are terrified, of going back to the total blindness, the deafness, the uncaring nothing that lives in the memory of our very matter.

I now feel this darkness. In a deep, winding cave, with walls prickled with nubbly rock formations as if it, too, had goosebumps. Without a beautiful view to look out over, or pine-scented air, or even sunlight, my thoughts quickly fill the vacuum.

My flashlight cuts a glaring white slash into this otherworld, revealing shades of gray and brown speckled with the occasional rusty red. I continue forward, further down the throat of this earthen beast.

My inhales, exhales, footsteps, are all oppressively loud in defiance of my effort to move with care, and the light of the flashlight is nearly offensive in how it touches the previously unwitnessed and undisturbed rock. I am an alien here, if only for the fact that I live and sense someplace so unalive and unsensing.

Once I’ve plunged deep enough, I halt the descent. Slowly, methodically, I lower myself to the clammy ground. I shut off my flashlight. I cease as much movement as I’m able.

And I wait.

It doesn’t take long. Though the cavern is wide and it echoes with every pebble that scuttles under my boots, the completeness of the dark settles over me like cold dust. My eyes widen, my pupils stretching and searching for any light at all, maybe a star or the green flash of a retina, but it’s just not there. I clutch my legs closer to my chest, overwhelmed by the utter lack. All there is now, all that exists on this foreign planet I’ve invaded, is the sickly coolness of the rock seeping into me from below, and my own trembling breaths.

Everyone says I’m crazy for coming out here, alone, for starting up this little ritual. They let me be, let me cope with my tragedy in however I see fit to. I think it’s just because they don’t know what else to do with me. And because it helps, in a way.

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**** My body is shaking now. The quiet, the blackness is damning, a tsunami that won’t stop falling on me, claustrophobic and exposing in equal measure.

This is what it is to predate creation. This is what it is to be, not dead, but never alive.

This is the closest I will come, while keeping my fragile heart beating, to my daughter who never was. My daughter who only ever knew the dark coffin of my insides. To my daughter, who did not have the great luck as I have to see life with her eyes and feel it with her hands, and instead had the grave misfortune of nothing at all.

I rise, the creak of my bones somehow ancient as I move back to the realm of the living, back with my fellows in existence. The flashlight clicks on, and colors leap back into my vision, the pieces of the void that had clung to me scattering as I return to a living thing, moving and seeing and hearing, and I turn back to the way I came.

As I come back to the sunlight, the animal sensations of hunger and thirst coming back to me, I feel heavy and fearful for what I must leave behind in the darkness. But it predates us all, our mother and queen, and for the mere candle-flicker of time my soul gets to spend on Earth in comparison to the eternal freezing breadth of all that comes before and after, my daughter is entrusted to her.