It was as if out of a dream. Ugh. I hate even saying that. I sound like all of the people I've dismissed in the past. It was though. Surreal. It didn't feel very frightening or spooky but it had a sort of mystical quality to it.
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My emotions got the better of me and I was fuming. It was my own fault, and actually quite petty, but I don't decide when anger takes me, I'm simply a vessel. In an effort to become better at controlling myself after becoming irate (or any emotion I don't want to be feeling), a new routine was formed. The emotion wells up inside me, I feel myself overreacting, and here is where I have been trying to remind myself to take a deep (deep) breath. That alone doesn't usually help, so tonight I took a walk. I rushed out of the house hastily due to my brain's zeal, and with haste typically comes carelessness. Of course I left my phone on my desk. It wasn't of grave importance, but it's one of those things you become so accustomed to that you feel different when you don't have it. I almost didn't feel myself.
I like the darkness. Contrary to everyone I have ever talked to, I find comfort in it. An almost immediate sense of calm came over me once I allowed my eyes to drink in the darkness around me. It's such a pleasant walk around the neighborhood at three in the morning. You're in a different place entirely. It's so very quiet. The type of quiet where you can hear leaves rustling from a gentle gust on a tree a full block away. The quiet that accompanies darkness. A good quiet. Being in a bit of a suburb you have only street lamps to illuminate the path. As I leered into the spotlight of the lamp at the end of the street, I realized how little I knew about light. You don't think about it often, but it's more mysterious than it lets on. There was simply a cone of light in front of me. The darkness was all around it, and it was almost as if there was a firm barrier. At one point, light, at the very next, dark. They butted up against each other and didn't battle for supremacy but instead recognized their own limits. I wondered why the light didn't reach further, glow brighter, or allow me to see more. Only half a block away, I had enough light to see my clothes and my shoes, and the surrounding foliage, but not to discern the different colors on them. I knew my sneakers were red, my pants were navy blue, and the weeds popping up between the sidewalk were green, but they were dull, foreign. Only memories. Interesting, and like the quiet, altogether unique in it's portrayal. I felt so hidden. An observer on the fringe of living. I could press myself up against the hedge blocking off the yard next to me and, if anyone else decided to venture out here, they'd never see me, even if they were looking.
A moment of lucidity showed me I had calmed down, so I circled back around the block to head home.
As I made the turn, a black plastic bag made it's way to the middle of the street, about two full blocks straight ahead. It reached the middle of the street and stopped dead. I followed it's lead. I'm not afraid of bags, but it wasn't very windy, so I decided to have a stare down. The uncertainty of the situation dawned on me. That was just some litter, right? Here is where I disagree with people about the dark, but I couldn't help but take a cautious approach. I'm not one to allow being alone in the dark turn something so innocuous into something frightening, I was just unsure. It was only a few seconds, but the the bag, which I can see clearly now is not a bag, crawled back to the side of the street it blew in from, then disappeared. The new clarity filled in some holes that my dubious brain left out. What looked like a bag before was very clearly an animal, sat down on it's hind and looking at me, before it walked back the same way it came. It looked too big to be a cat. It wasn't a skunk, I could clearly see it's belly and it's at least somewhat feline features. A fox, perhaps? Do they have foxes around here? I cursed myself for not knowing. It seems a very simple fact, yet I was entirely stumped. And why haven't I moved? I just kept looking at where this creature had been.
I detest when people have a strange encounter and their first reaction is to chalk it up to the occult. I am a vehement denier of ghost stories, especially since every single one I have ever been told by someone contains the phrase ''it just felt weird.'' How foolish I looked, my pride quickly extinguished, as I stood here in awe of a simple animal out for a walk. Why did this feel so strange to me? The creature was silhouetted perfectly by the street lamp between us, so it was entirely black. I couldn't make out any distinguishing features. It really was bigger than a cat. It really did sit in the center of the street and look at me for as long as I looked at it. Those things happened. I'm a credible source. The most credible I will get during this event is right here and now, when I'm not trying to retell it and it's fresh in my mind. I also hate that it vanished before my eyes. The corner of the street it walked back to is the hilly corner of someone's small front yard, so it should have been visible for a while. I couldn't track it. I don't know where it went. It just wasn't there anymore.
For a while I thought about what it looked like from the other side. This poor maybe-cat, maybe-fox, just wanted to cross the street and a spooky human stood in the middle of the street staring at it, and stayed there for what had to have been minutes, even after it slinked away. Any bystanders coming my way would have seen a man all by his lonesome at this time of night, standing there. Menacing. Innocently lost in thought, but looking murderous, as night tends to make us.
This didn't turn me into a believer. I'm not one of those poor people who don't believe until ''something'' happens to them. Nothing else even remotely intriguing happened the rest of the walk home, if you want to consider that part intriguing. I kept walking that way, since I had to, and I checked down the street it went down when I arrived there. It was pitch dark. I saw no movement, no animal, not a thing. I stood there for a few seconds, hoping that I would get my resolution, but alas I was met with nothing but a deep black and a soft, warm, conformable breeze. So I'm not some loon who thinks they saw something supernatural, but I can't deny that something so simple, so banal, so run-of-the-mill made me want to think I was. Maybe it has no merit at all. If the same thing had happened in the light of day, surely I wouldn't feel this way. I would have just seen an animal walk across the street. I don't attribute this to the power of souls, specters, or spirits, but to my comfortable blanket of darkness. Is this a damning glimpse into the fragile human psyche, which longs for adventure and mysteries and a break from the monotonous existence we've made for it? Does this desire to see magic in the world force us to create it out of smoke and haze and communal fear? Do our vivid imaginations always seek to fill the gaps in our understanding and in our memories? I will not allow complacency to turn me into a hapless sod, pining after a trifle to add substance. I will not become a prophet, seeking to turn others to my cause.
Or maybe I will. What could it hurt? I guess I really did see a ghost black cat in the middle of the night, and it made sure I did. I had a brush with death as the spooky thing stared me down. Ghosts do exist and I've seen one, without a doubt. You're bound to see one, too. It's probably watching you right now. They don't come out until it's dark, though. Just like me.
