Eight Minutes of Light

Here is what I know about light. It bends in water. I learned this in school and forgot it and learned it again last month, looking things up at 1 AM. It comes through the kitchen window at 4 PM and makes the unwashed dishes look like something from a museum. Still life with grief. Still life with starting over. Still life with whatever this is. I stand there and watch it move across the counter, the floor, the wall. I don’t know why I do this. I don’t know what I’m waiting for.

I have glass birds on the windowsill. I move them when the light shifts. There are flowers on the table I bought for myself. I rearrange them. I keep lists. What to buy, what to do, what order to do it in. Sometimes just words I like the sound of. Sometimes words I’m hoping will connect to other words. I am always arranging something. I think this is how I survive.

They call it an octopus garden. Octopuses collect objects and arrange them at the entrances of their dens. Shells, rocks, bottle caps, broken glass. The octopus has no skeleton. It’s soft all the way through and everything in the ocean wants to eat it. So maybe the shells are protection. Maybe they’re camouflage. But researchers have watched them rearrange the same shell over and over. Pick something up and put it back. Reach for something else. There’s something happening that isn’t just survival. They do this alone. I think about this more than I should. The alone part. The arranging part. The way you can build something beautiful and still be the only one who sees it.

I have loved people badly. By which I mean too fast or not fast enough.

There is a way of living that is not quite living. You are present but not entirely. You wake up, you get dressed, you open the blinds, and the light comes in and you watch it move across the floor and you think, that’s beautiful, and you don’t feel anything. Or you feel something far away, like a sound from another room. You go through the day. You check things off the list. You buy groceries. You water the plants. You stand at the window at the same time every day because that’s when the light is good and you know the light is good because you’ve stood there before and felt something, but now you’re just standing there. You’re on the outskirts of your own life, watching it happen. The light still arrives. The dishes still pile up. The flowers on the table still open and then wilt and you replace them because that’s what you do, that’s what you’ve always done, but you’re not sure why anymore. You’re not sure what you’re decorating for. There is a version of you that is fully inside her life and there is a version of you that is watching from somewhere else, and most days you can’t tell which one is real. The light doesn’t care. The light just keeps coming through the window like it’s your job to receive it. Maybe it is. Maybe that’s all any of this is. Standing in the light and hoping one day you’ll feel it again.

No one told me life could destroy you. Not damage. Destroy. That darkness waits, patient, and you’re always one breath away from devastation. I tried hard. I lived well. It got ripped away anyway. No one tells you this. You just find out. And then you wake up the next day and the light is still coming through the window like nothing happened and you think, okay. Okay. What now.

I know what it feels like to stand in a room with someone and want to stay there forever. To meet someone and think, oh. There you are. Like you were waiting without knowing it. And then time does what it does.

Once, someone I loved told me that light is holy. I don’t know if I believed him then. I’m trying to believe him now. I watch it come through the window and I think about what he meant. How light doesn’t ask anything of you. How it just arrives, every day, whether you’re ready or not. It fills the room without permission. It finds the corners. It doesn’t know what you’ve lost. It doesn’t care. Maybe that’s what makes it holy. It keeps coming. It doesn’t stop for grief. It doesn’t wait for you to be okay. It just keeps reaching through the glass and landing on whatever is there. Maybe faith is just that. Letting it land on you.

Sometimes it takes my breath away. That we were here together once. My son and I. Under this same sky. That the light coming through the window now is the same light that touched his face. I don’t know what to do with this. That the sky doesn’t change. That the light keeps arriving like nothing happened. He was here. We lived in the same world at the same time. We stood under the same sun. And now I stand here alone and the sky is the same sky and the light is the same light and he is not.

Splendere. Latin. To shine. But also the root of resplendent. To shine back. Light that returns. There is ordinary light and then there is light that comes back to you. I am waiting for the second kind.

There are threads connecting everything. I believe this. I have to. Otherwise it’s just me and the glass birds and the light spilling through the stained glass like something sacred.

The sun is 93 million miles away. Its light takes eight minutes to reach us. If the sun went out right now, we would have eight minutes of not knowing. We would be in the dark and think we were still in the light. This happens with other things too. Love. Safety. The people you thought would stay. You live in the afterglow without knowing it’s already over. The light is still traveling toward you. It hasn’t arrived yet, the news of what you’ve lost. And when it does, you realize you were never standing in the present. You were always eight minutes behind.