what sitting alone in total darkness inside an abandoned cave taught me about heartache

i want to tell you about two caves. one i paid for. one i didn't. neither of them was what i expected.

the island had a reputation for its grottos. i'd read about it somewhere, one of those places that shows up in a paragraph in a guidebook and then gets a single photo in a travel blog from six years ago that never got updated. not famous. just known, in the quiet way places get known when the tourists haven't fully found them yet.

i saw the sign near the center of town. handwritten, laminated, zip-tied to a fence. cave tour. the price, when i did the math on my phone (the one time i used it that day), came to about nine dollars american.

nine dollars felt reasonable for a cave. i paid.

the person at the entrance walked me through what turned out to be their house. living room, kitchen, a dog that looked at me with the particular expression of a dog that has seen many confused tourists pass through its home. then out through a back door and yes, there it was: a cave entrance, built into a stone wall on their property like a feature they'd always had and eventually decided to charge admission for.

it was small. genuinely small. the kind of cave that takes about four minutes to see completely and then you're looking at the walls trying to find something you missed.

i thanked them. i was going to leave when the person held out their hand and said, in english that was much clearer than their tour narration had been, that there was a tip.

nine dollars.

the tour was nine dollars. the tip suggestion was also nine dollars. i don't know what the math was there. i handed over a ten, didn't wait for change, and left in a direction that was away from that house as efficiently as i could manage without actually running.

the town was supposedly built on caves. i'd read that somewhere too. not built over caves -- built on them, like the ground underneath had always been porous and people had just decided to live there anyway and pretend it wasn't.

so i walked. out of town, into the kind of woods that don't get mentioned in any guide because they don't have a name and aren't on the way to anything. i was looking for something and i wasn't sure what, which is a state i've learned to trust more than any plan i've ever made.

i found it maybe forty minutes in. a cave entrance, slightly below ground level, like someone had been working on it from the top down. the entry was reinforced -- concrete on the edges, some rusted rebar sticking out at angles that suggested the project hadn't finished and the person who was supposed to come back and finish it never did. real estate developer, maybe. tourism project that ran out of money or will or both. whatever it was, it was abandoned. and it was open.

i went in.

the first thing you notice in a real cave is that the darkness doesn't arrive all at once. it comes in layers. the entrance is dim but you can still see. then you go further and it's the kind of dark where you can still make out shapes. then further and it's the kind of dark where you start to wonder if your eyes are adjusting or if there's actually nothing to adjust to.

i don't bring my phone into places like this. i know how that sounds. but a phone is a way out, and i've found that when you have a way out in your pocket you never fully arrive. the whole point is to be somewhere with no exits you haven't earned. so i left it in my bag near the entrance and went in with just myself.

the cave was considerably larger than the nine dollar one. bigger than i expected from the outside, the way caves tend to be because the inside of a thing almost never matches your estimate of it from the entrance.

i sat down at some point and stopped moving.

it got completely dark. the kind of dark that doesn't have gradients. the kind where you hold your hand in front of your face and don't see anything, and the strange thing is you stop expecting to see anything after a while and then its fine. actually more than fine. there's something that happens when your eyes stop receiving information and the rest of you has to pick up the slack. you hear more. you feel the temperature differently. you become aware of your own breathing in a way you usually aren't, because your breathing is one of the only pieces of evidence that you're still here.

it was calming in a way i can't fully explain without it sounding like the kind of thing someone says in a wellness article. so i'll just say: i sat in the dark for what felt like a while and came out feeling like something had been reset.

but i also started to worry. not panic -- i have a pretty even relationship with discomfort at this point. more like a low-level accounting of the situation. dark cave, no phone, no way to know how long i'd been in there, no way to know what it looked like outside. the worry wasn't about the cave. it was about the time.

i came out and it was dark outside too.

not the kind of dark i'd just been in -- outside dark has gradients, has a sky, has the particular gray-blue quality of a night after a clear day. but it was late. past late. the kind of late that rearranges your relationship to the rest of the evening.

i hitchhiked back. someone picked me up without asking questions, which is the kind of grace that shows up exactly when it needs to. by the time i got back to the bunker i was sleeping in it was close to 2am.

what i remember most clearly about the walk from the car to the bunker is this: it took maybe ten minutes. and for most of those ten minutes, i couldn't tell the difference between being inside the cave and being outside of it.

not literally. i could see the road. i could see the buildings. but the feeling of the cave -- the particular quality of being inside a darkness that has nothing to do with you -- hadn't left yet. i was out but i was still in it somehow. the transition happened physically without happening any other way.

heartache works exactly like this and i have been thinking about it ever since.

you're inside something for long enough and the dark becomes the normal. you stop expecting light in the way you used to. you adjust your other senses. you learn to navigate by things that aren't what you'd normally use to navigate.

and then you leave. you make the decision, or the decision gets made for you, and you move toward the exit and eventually you're out.

and you're still in it. for longer than makes sense. the outside looks different from how you remembered but your nervous system is still running cave software. still calibrated for the dark. still expecting less than there is.

i don't think there's a fix for this. i think it's just how transitions work. the physical exit is the easy part. the rest takes the time it takes.

i sat in a cave by myself in total darkness and found it calming. i think that says something about what i'd gotten used to, before and during and probably after.

the song exists. it'll be out soon. it's quiet for a reason.