When Darkness Drips

It started with a leak.

Not water, not oil—something slower, thicker. It stained the ceiling above my bed like ink bleeding through fragile skin. I first noticed it on a Tuesday, the kind of gray day that leaves a taste of metal on your tongue. The kind where silence feels like it's holding its breath.

The darkness came one drop at a time. At first, I told myself it was nothing—a trick of the eye, or the kind of shadow that comes with too much thinking and too little sleep. But on the fourth night, I woke to a faint tapping sound. Like a finger gently rapping against my skull from the inside.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

And still I told no one. What could I say? That the ceiling was bleeding darkness? That it seemed to hum when I stared at it too long? I had long since learned the cost of speaking things aloud. Some truths do not want to be freed.

By the sixth night, it had begun to pool on the floor. A thick, tar-like substance, glimmering faintly in the moonlight that pushed weakly through the blinds. It didn’t smell, didn’t move on its own—but it felt alive. Like it had eyes.

I considered leaving. Packing a bag, walking into the fog, forgetting this place entirely. But the longer I stayed, the more I realized: it wasn’t trying to hurt me.

It was trying to speak.

I placed a small glass jar beneath the slow drip, just to see. Each drop fell with reverence, like the pause between two aching verses of a song I had once known and forgotten. After the jar was half full, I reached inside.

It was cold—not the kind of cold that bites, but the kind that soothes. Like fingers running through your hair while you cry. Like the hush of snow before it touches the earth.

I should have been afraid. But what I felt was... seen.

The darkness whispered in a language I didn’t recognize, but I understood all the same. It told me stories. Of places I had forgotten. Of the time I lay beneath my grandmother’s piano, listening to the dust dance in the sun. Of the night my father left, and how I convinced myself it was my fault. Of the first time I looked at someone and realized I could love them in ways that would never be returned.

It was a mirror without reflection. It didn’t need light to show me who I was.

Every night after, I listened. Not with ears, but with bones. The house changed subtly. The walls no longer creaked with loneliness—they breathed. The corners didn’t lurk; they waited. The darkness was everywhere now, not dripping but settling, like ink across a page that had waited too long to be written on.

And I wrote.

Poems, fragments, memories—things I didn’t even know I still carried. I stopped checking the time. I ate less. Slept in bursts. I laughed once. Out loud. It surprised even me.

One evening, someone knocked at the door. A neighbor, perhaps. A friend from a past life. I don’t remember.

They asked if I was okay.

I looked at them through the veil of dusk that now clung to every surface of the house like ivy.

“Do I look unwell?” I asked.

They stared at me for a long moment.

“You look like someone who's dreaming with their eyes open.”

I smiled. “Then let me keep dreaming.”

Eventually, the darkness stopped dripping. It no longer needed to. It was here—woven into the fabric of the house, and into me.

I wasn’t afraid of death anymore. Not in the way people mean when they say it. I didn’t long for it, but I understood it. The darkness had shown me that death wasn’t an ending. It was a translation. A soft reinterpretation of being.

Now, when I sit beneath the ceiling, I feel warmth above me. Not from the sun or stars, but from some other source—older, kinder. Sometimes I still hear the drip, not from the ceiling, but from my own heart. Slow and steady.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Not the sound of dying.

The sound of remembering.