A small light

Imagine this: you are eight years old. You are strongly myopic with a cross-bite. Your pigeon-toes, corrected postnatally with an impressive brace, are now just a ghost in the machine.

You are one year away from your mother’s ex-communication from the Mormons and, therefore, two years shy of the whole “spawn of Satan” period. You are three years away from the impending Tampax bombshell and four years away from the molestation by your father’s oldest friend. (Minor for you, it will be major for him. Or, at least, that’s what the collective thinking will be when he dies by stepping in front of a Standard Oil truck.)

Into your lap, a copy of Harriet the Spy drops.

And you realize, suddenly, you are not alone. There is a tribe out there. A tribe of people who carry notebooks and know things. A tribe of people to whom you belong: The Writers.

Prior to this point, you didn’t know that this was a thing a person could be. You didn’t know that there were people who could do a thing they loved instead of what they hated. Or that a dream was a thing a person could decide to have.

And in this lightning-struck spark, a small light will flicker on. And you will notice the light, and the light will notice you.

And it will stay on, even during the lean years. The years when you forget yourself and stop writing. The year when you leave your husband, who will get married to someone else who will make him look far happier than he ever did with you. Or the year when your next lover, the one you thought you really loved, will go back home to the wife he was trying to run away from.

Sometimes, the light will rage and threaten to burn everything in its wake. This will scare you. Then, one day, you will wake up and realize the burning is happening only because you’ve ignored the light—you’ve let it burn down and all of its butter has run over the altar. Or, worse, you’ve tried to extinguish it by replacing it with somebody else’s light.

And then you buy a book, a really good book, from the famous guy who loves the Russians. Its matterlightblooming will speak to your light and remind you that you, too, have a light. That small, scrappy, flinty light you have shit on endlessly. That light that is still inside you, hollering in your chest, just waiting to be let out.