Bad things happen at night…

Bad things happen at night.
You know this because you are no stranger to the evils that lurk.
The first time you cheated on your lover, it was at night. Dinner with a group of friends, good laughs and eventually, conversations with a cute guy in the pack that ran late into the night. Long after the group had split, you stayed talking with him about life and work and somehow it ended in a kiss. You never told your lover and you blamed it on all the alcohol you’d had to drink, seeing as it was your first time. But in truth, it was only one of the inevitable evils that lurked in the shadows of the night.
The first time you discovered you were a serial flirt, it was also at night. Things went south with the lover shortly after you cheated and you just unleashed. So there were multiple chats running on your phone and with each guy, you were teasing, laughing and drawing into a web that you knew would only end in hurt. But you didn’t care. It was all fun and games.
The first time you attempted suicide, it was also at night. Long after the serial flirting, you eventually fell for someone you couldn’t be with. It seemed like poetic justice, considering the number of hearts you had crushed in the run up to that moment. You fell in love with someone who numbed your senses and left you feeling a special kind of high. Someone who was everything you ever dreamed of but the one thing that was most important.
You got tired of going round in circles. Of hearing him express unimaginable depths of love for you, yet always ending with “I wish I could be with you, but…” And worse than that, you got tired of mourning his death which happened at night when he got stabbed for trying to defend a lady’s dignity.
So on that night after weeks of indulging in an ever flowing fountain of tears, you popped an uncountable number of pills because death would indeed be better than living without him. Solomon was right when he said to “not awaken love before its time, because the power of love is as strong as death.”
Bad things happen at night. You know this for a fact. But what you also know is that sometimes good things happen too. Maybe not as often as the bad but they certainly do happen.
Like how you read a tweet expanding Jeremiah 29:11 right after you popped those pills. The handle sharing the tweets was random and unknown to you. But the person talked about faith and purpose and having more to live for than you ever considered.
And of course, there was the housemate who was strangely awake at that odd hour that rushed you off to the hospital after you told her with tears in your eyes that you didn’t want to die.
Bad things happen at night. You know this because you are no stranger to the evils that lurk.
So when you find yourself wide awake on another night with all the shadows of evil lurking, you tell yourself that there are one or two good things that can come from the night. So you pick your laptop and pour heart into it until your fingers are hurting and your eyes start shutting. Because you will wake up in the morning and you will read all that you wrote and will be proud of yourself for surviving, rather than succumbing to the evils that lurk at night.