Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

by Ashley Winstead

“Promise me it’ll be you and me forever.”

In a million years, I never would’ve guessed that the first time I’d fall in love, it would be with the earth itself.

That had to be the worst kind of prison—the one whose bars were buried under your skin, invisible cages around your heart and mind.

The fog cleared from my mind and the night revealed itself with sudden sharpness: the sounds in nearby woods not melodic but the triumphant baying of predators, the houses on the street not peaceful but too still, like corpses, painted lurid bloody red by a moon with pockmarks, its face not a jewel but a network of pits and bruises.

“You’d be surprised how sadistic people are when they know they can get away with it.”

“Are you going to grow up a good girl, Miss Ruth, or are you going to be a threat to your daddy?”

Whatever you do, you must never let them catch you.”

“Only if you tell me what you see.” His slow unfurling smile was bittersweet. “The center of the world.”

He’d been more than my best friend—sometimes a person was bigger than that. Sometimes they were your freedom. The whole woods, the channel through which you first fell in love with the earth, felt at home in it.

It’s funny what you can see for other people that you can’t see for yourself.

But this is what I wanted before I even had the language for it: the kind of love that can look at ugliness, complexity, the unvarnished truth, and not flinch. A love that peels back the layers. Forget God. This is the love that will save me.

What is it about us teenage girls that claws so deeply under people’s skin? We’re reviled and desired in equal measure; cringed at, laughed at, then lunged at. The sheer effort people like my father and my teachers have spent trying to control us. So many dress codes and rigid rules and unspoken ones we have taken on the mantel of policing ourselves, looking in the mirror and wincing at our reflections, drawing our own blood first, before others can.

I know what it’s like to be torn in different directions. To try to understand what you think is right and wrong, what you care about, who you are, when everyone’s trying to sell you their version.

And sometimes a person is more than a person. Sometimes they’re a lifeline. Your ticket out, not just of a house or a town but an invisible prison whose bars are in your mind. Sometimes they’re a key in the exact shape of the lock that cages you.