Reflections on grief, healing and transformation
#15 Three candles
First, there was me. Then came a tiny girl with delicate wrists, large eyes, too-long eyelashes and coursing rivers of questions. She held her pencil in the diamond-hard fist of her left hand, writing her name carefully A-Y-N-A-T. “It’s dyslexia,” said the teachers, “but we can help,”. After she learned to read from the left end of the page to the right, she began to do everything the accepted way, following forged paths until she was lost in them, seeking to entertain and please, to become friends or to offer the illusion of friendship. Even her feet turned toward each other companionably. The high points of her shoulders pressed forward to meet you, her elbows pointed back like the wings of an awkward, flightless fledgling. Now she’s a swan, a wild, beautiful thing, disenchanted with the sameness of the sea and ready to fly again. When will she stop talking? How many years has it been since she began? I’ve forgotten because I don’t remember a world without her words and her long fingers that didn’t hold the bubble gently over the piano keys. I don’t remember a night without the wild coarse tangles of her hair on the pillow, her dreams that filled up all the space between the stars, her whispers in the dark bedroom. She is the first crank of the lever that begins a carousel and then she’s the dizzying lights, the tinkle of the music, the endless spinning, the glee in children’s laughter. I sometimes wish I could plant a tree in the mountain-top wind of her mind. Come down, I say. For heaven’s sake, come down. Come and feel how the steady earth can hold your feet. But she won’t (or she can’t). Is she happy in the sky-bright air? If there are faces turned toward her in admiration, awe, love or bewilderment, perhaps she is or can be. And in all this heady flight, she is the only one who still curls up into our mothers’ lap arranging her limbs like a child’s, settling her bones, accepting soft coos and fingers through her hair.
And then there is him. Swift like her, but in a different way; a creature with fins purposefully parting water. While she builds fantasies that glitter in the sun but break down under the weight of reality, he puts down rock after rock in the earth, building. It seems now that he grew up overnight so that in a blink, he was no longer a baby, then no longer an angry little toddler, but a tall, tall man with opinions and actions and purposes outside of what we told him. Yet for all the intensity of who he is and for all his clear-eyed movement, he is endearing and charming and there is a softness to him that makes everyone love him. You can see it in how he talks to young and old alike, putting his whole self into the mundane and the serious with equal vigour and honesty.
We came into the world in a line. The S. Then the T. And the other S. But when I was born, I think I waited for her and then together we waited for him. It makes me imagine that we sought each other out in the world before this one, our fingers grasping in the dark. To experience such a connectedness through a life that has always seemed a bit uncertain, to close one’s eyes and at once make nothing of physical distance, to say “these are my people” and know it to be true in one’s bones — these are blessings of greater divinity than humans can imagine. In my childhood, we were the eyes of the one who happened to be out of the room. We retold stories from three points of view and laughed. Our lives, unique and separate, are stitched together. On a night when even the stars are away, I see them as dancing candle flames, lighting up the whole wide world and I remember why I am strong.
