There’s something melancholic about taking a walk at night, especially when the weather turns cold and the moon shines bright. You’ll find how easily you’ve taken for granted your pointed-ears being warm, for one, but that’s nothing really. It’s just you, alone in the dark, bathed in a faint light that guides the path.
That’s what’s nice about night walks: it’s just you. That’s what also makes it a bit uncomfortable: it’s just you and your thoughts. And yet it was by a creek hidden in the dark, revealed only by its murmurings and moonlight highlights, which I found myself holding company with my thoughts; I had no particular reason for it either.
Maybe a few too many things worth getting self-conscious over had happened – leaving me to feel like a jester – or maybe nothing at all. What I did know was that my head was heavy, and my chest hollow, so I squatted on a fine rock, and watched the moon for a bit in hopes this feeling would pass me by. In a moment like this, I remember some of the best advice I’ve heard.
“Don’t trust any thoughts you have about your life once the sun goes down.”
It’s gotten me through rough patches in the road with how often my thoughts on my future turn sour with nightfall. Maybe it’ll do the same for you if you can remember it, but for all the good it does, it doesn’t stop the sadness from being real; a kind of depression that comes and goes like the wind being carried to and fro is still a depression. Worse yet when you can only wait it out. So, now I know this feeling will pass, and I only have to wait for it to pass, but I still pondered on what the feeling was, and how I could describe it – it’s all I really could do.
It’s like sitting in your cave or home – or wherever you might dwell – in the middle of a storm, and suddenly a quiet gust of wind cuts through to extinguish all the candles in an instant, leaving you in the dark. Things ought to feel familiar since you’re still home, but it’s all off now. It’s not how it should be.
Whether or not it’s a good way of explaining it, I still enjoyed watching the moon that night, before I made the hike back to my cave, and prepared for the next day. The sadness passes in its own time when there’s nothing I can do to fix it.
“The Goblin Cave” weaves vivid imagery and prose with reflections and commentary on the world around us. Written by Ethan Reisler, “The Goblin Cave” looks at society, reality and culture from a far away land not unlike our own.