There are places where darkness feels like an absence.
And there are places where darkness becomes a kind of language.
The Glowworm Caves of Waitomo, in New Zealand’s North Island, belong to the second kind. Beneath the limestone, an underground river carries visitors into a world without daylight, without distance, without the familiar reassurance of seeing what waits ahead. Above them, thousands of tiny blue-green lights gather on the ceiling like a slow constellation.
That was where Tomas and Eli went when neither of them knew how to ask the other to stay.
They had been together for eleven months, which was long enough for desire to become habit and habit to become something more frightening. Tomas had begun leaving a toothbrush at Eli’s flat. Eli had begun sleeping on the side of the bed nearest the window, as if an easy escape route might still be necessary.
Their relationship had never been simple.
Tomas had come out at twenty-two with the fierce, exhausted certainty of someone who had spent too long mistaking silence for safety. Eli, who identified as bisexual, had taken a different route through fear. He had told some people. He had told no one else. He had learned to measure every room before admitting what he wanted in it.
Especially when what he wanted was Tomas.
Especially when Tomas looked at him as though wanting him should be enough.
“Are you afraid of the cave?” Tomas asked as they followed their guide down the path.
Eli smiled without looking at him. “I’m afraid of most things that involve being unable to see.”
“That’s not the same as being afraid.”
“It is when you’re me.”
The cave opened around them in layers: damp limestone, dark water, the mineral scent of stone holding centuries in its pores. Every sound seemed softened by the walls. Footsteps became small, private disturbances. Voices lowered instinctively. Even the guide spoke with the careful calm of someone entering a place that did not belong entirely to human beings.
The Waitomo Glowworm Caves are home to Arachnocampa luminosa, a species found in New Zealand. Despite the name, glowworms are not worms at all. They are the larval stage of a fungus gnat, and the larval phase is the longest and most luminous part of their life.
For roughly six to twelve months, each larva hangs from the cave ceiling, feeding and growing in the darkness. It creates a silk-and-mucus nest and lowers fine fishing threads into the air below. The threads are beaded with sticky droplets. Small flying insects, drawn towards the blue-green light, become entangled. The larva reels them in and feeds.
Beauty, in Waitomo, is not separate from hunger.
That fact stayed with Eli.
He had always believed that if people knew the full truth of him, they would find something grasping beneath the tenderness. Something too needy. Too watchful. Too easily wounded. His jealousy had never arrived as rage at first. It began as questions asked too casually.
Who was that message from?
Why did you take so long?
Do you still want me when you’re not looking at me?
He had tried to make those questions smaller. Tomas had heard them growing.
The boat waited at the edge of the underground river. One by one, the visitors stepped aboard. There was no engine growl to break the atmosphere, only the faint shift of water against wood and the careful movement of the guide as he took hold of the overhead rope.
Then the lights disappeared.
Absolute dark is not simply the absence of sight. It changes the body. It makes the shoulders rise. It turns breathing into an announcement. It asks the mind to invent shapes where none exist.
Eli felt Tomas’s hand find his.
For a moment, he held on too tightly.
Tomas did not pull away.
The boat moved into the grotto in near-silence. Tourists who had been speaking moments earlier became still. The underground river carried them slowly beneath the vaulted ceiling, and then the first lights appeared.
One.
Then another.
Then thousands.
Blue-green points shimmered overhead, scattered across the black rock like stars seen from the wrong side of the world. Some seemed distant and cold. Others hung close enough to feel almost within reach. The glow reflected faintly on the water, making the river appear to carry a second sky.
Eli forgot to be afraid of being seen.
He looked upward and thought of all the things that lived most fully where no one could demand an explanation.
The glowworms did not shine because the darkness had defeated them. They shone because darkness was the condition that made their survival possible. Their light was a lure, a signal, a practical act of feeding. It was not decorative. It was not an apology.
Tomas leaned closer. “Beautiful,” he whispered.
Eli could not tell whether he meant the cave.
“I’m sorry,” Eli said.
Tomas turned towards him, though in the dark he could only make out the shape of his face.
“For what?”
“For making you feel like loving me was work.”
The boat continued forward.
Eli swallowed. “I keep thinking that if I need too much, you’ll decide I’m not worth the trouble. So I try to hide it. Then it comes out sideways. As jealousy. As suspicion. As me waiting for you to prove something you didn’t promise to prove.”
Tomas’s thumb moved once across his knuckles.
“I know,” he said.
The words should have comforted him. Instead, Eli felt the old panic rise.
“You know?”
“I know you’re frightened.”
“I’m not only frightened.”
“No,” Tomas said. “You’re intense. You notice everything. You love as if the room might vanish if you stop paying attention.”
Eli closed his eyes.
“I thought you hated that.”
“Sometimes I hate what fear makes you do with it.” Tomas’s voice remained gentle. “But I don’t hate the part of you that feels deeply.”
Above them, the glowworms continued their quiet work. Each larva held its small blue-green light over the silk threads below, waiting for something winged to come close enough to catch. The light did not guarantee safety. It did not promise that every offering would be met with care.
But it made the hidden visible.
That was the terror of love, Eli thought. Not that someone might see the worst thing in you. That they might see the whole of you and remain long enough to make your old defences unnecessary.
By the time the boat emerged from beneath the brightest part of the grotto, Tomas and Eli were still holding hands.
The guide continued to speak softly about the glowworms’ life cycle. After the larval stage, the creature forms a pupa and eventually emerges as an adult fungus gnat. The adult has no functioning mouthparts and lives only a few days, long enough to mate and continue the cycle. The luminous phase is temporary, but while it lasts, the cave is transformed.
Eli thought of coming out. Of the years he had spent treating identity as a door that could be opened only for certain people. Of the strange grief of being known in fragments.
“I don’t want to keep hiding you,” he said.
Tomas looked at him.
“I don’t mean making announcements,” Eli continued. “I mean hiding the fact that this matters. Hiding you when I’m afraid someone will ask what you are to me.”
“And what am I?”
Eli’s answer came quietly.
“You’re the man I love.”
There was no dramatic music. No sudden flood of light. Only the river beneath them, the damp air, the small creak of the boat, and Tomas’s hand closing around his.
Outside, the morning waited beyond the cave entrance. The world would be bright and ordinary. There would still be questions. There would still be jealousy to unlearn, fear to name, and old reflexes that would return when either of them felt exposed.
Reconciliation did not make them flawless.
It gave them a place to begin again.
Tomas rested his forehead against Eli’s.
“Your intensity isn’t a flaw,” he said. “But it has to belong to you before it can belong safely between us.”
Eli breathed in the mineral-dark air.
“And your need isn’t something I have to punish myself for?”
“No.”
The answer was simple. That did not make it easy. It made it possible.
Some lights do not ask to be understood before they are believed. They do not argue for their right to exist. They simply appear in the darkness, small and persistent, revealing what has been there all along.
A note from Read with Pride
For readers drawn to emotional MM romance, character-driven queer fiction, and beautifully complex gay love stories, explore the work of Dick Ferguson through Read with Pride. These are stories of vulnerability, jealousy, coming out, bisexuality, resilience, and the difficult courage of allowing another man to see you clearly.
Discover more LGBTQ+ ebooks, gay books, MM romance books, queer fiction, gay novels, and heartfelt gay fiction on the Read with Pride home page.
Three possible next Morning Edition stories
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Morning Edition: The Salt Flats of Bolivia : Where Two Men Learned That Even a Reflection Can Tell the Truth
An emotionally charged story about identity, distance, and the fear of becoming visible to the person you love. -
Morning Edition: The Midnight Sun of Svalbard : Where Two Men Discovered That Darkness Is Not the Only Thing That Keeps Us Awake
A lyrical exploration of insomnia, possessive jealousy, and the fragile peace of being chosen. -
Morning Edition: The Blue City of Chefchaouen : Where Two Men Found That Some Secrets Are Painted in Plain Sight
A character-driven queer love story about coming out, family expectations, and learning to stop treating tenderness as a weakness.
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