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A Letter to Light

 

 

 

Dear sister,

 

I was born first,

 

then you.

 

 

 

I held our mother’s attention

 

for just a wonderful fraction of a second

 

before you arrived

 

and I was cast aside.

 

 

 

I never tasted that sweet affection again.

 

 

 

You were embraced.

 

Mother said you were holy,

 

that God sent you,

 

that God was you.

 

 

 

I was trash in the incinerator.

 

 

 

You, with your strawberry bubble gum

 

that popped

 

and crackled

 

every time Mother switched a light bulb on,

 

you outshone me in every way.

 

 

 

I learned to shrink from you

 

to keep from getting burned.

 

 

 

Now, you occupy every home,

 

even after your bedtime has passed.

 

I can only enter Mother’s bedroom

 

for a few precious hours

 

when her eyes are closed.

 

I slip beneath her eyelids,

 

but dreams overcome her,

 

and she is comforted by the illusion

 

that you are there instead of me.

 

 

 

Sometimes, when children are plagued with insomnia,

 

they plead their parents to keep me away

 

for nights on end.

 

They tug on your golden shirtsleeves

 

and beg you to stay with them all night long.

 

They point into their closets, saying

 

they are afraid of me.

 

 

 

I am a child’s monster.

 

 

 

You are the knight in shining armor that shields her from me.

 

 

 

You sweep your vanilla scent through crowded ballrooms,

 

wearing white gowns and glass slippers,

 

and you dance on the sculpted ice chandeliers

 

that hang from the ceilings

 

of the grandest palaces.

 

 

 

I am found in dungeons.

 

Not as punishment for me;

 

no, I’m not that important to anyone.

 

There’s simply

 

nowhere else

 

for me to go.

 

 

 

When New York City is buried in snow

 

and you get tangled up in wires

 

and the city sleeps,

 

I fill every room,

 

an unwelcome guest.

 

 

 

People can’t stand me –

 

or rather, the absence of you.

 

When your warm, rich belly

 

does not expand to fill the dining rooms

 

and overflow from the apartment windows,

 

I am all that remains.

 

I am unwanted.

 

Hands fumble blindly in kitchen drawers,

 

searching for a match,

 

searching for a candle,

 

searching

 

for you.

 

 

 

I fill the night sky,

 

but nobody points at me

 

in awe.

 

Instead, they find pinpricks of you in the stars,

 

and they lay still in the grass

 

to search for you behind me.

 

When you are nestled beneath a blanket of clouds,

 

I am all that remains.

 

When you are hidden, no voice rings out in delight

 

that my face is finally visible

 

without the acne marks of your stars.

 

No, the only voices in the night

 

are singing songs of sadness,

 

of missing you.

 

 

 

When you spring to life

 

from a teenage boy’s lighter,

 

you are the in flame that flickers with the wind.

 

I am the ugly smoke

 

that bathes his lungs in asphalt.

 

And when the hands of his watch

 

have turned sufficiently,

 

I am nothing but ashes

 

on a porcelain tray.

 

You are gone.

 

 

 

You fill the earth’s lungs with beauty,

 

and when beauty is gone,

 

so are you.

 

And when you disappear,

 

I am all that remains.

 

 

 

My heart is ugly,

 

full of the sins that I symbolize.

 

I am a black kettle,

 

howling,

 

burning with envy

 

of you.

 

If my eyes were any color but black,

 

they’d be green.

 

 

 

You are beautiful.

 

When we were young enough

 

to dance together

 

as the sun set

 

and my shadows could touch your sun beams,

 

I would gaze at your shimmering white braids

 

and imagine myself tangled up in you.

 

 

 

Once, when you were sleeping,

 

I attempted to try on your glass slippers

 

and your shimmering halo of sunlight

 

They didn’t fit

 

my awkward, deformed body.

 

Mother laughed in my face.

 

What a stupid girl.

 

I was not meant for beautiful things.

 

I never was.

 

 

 

Maybe you and I

 

came from different fathers:

 

you from God, I from the devil.

 

Maybe we aren’t twins

 

after all.

 

 

 

But despite our differences,

 

we are sisters –

 

descendants of the earth.

 

Our genetic code is etched

 

into the crevices of our arms

 

as we link them

 

when the sun sets.

 

We create each other –

 

we define ourselves as each other’s antonyms,

 

and we tattoo each other’s definitions

 

in the palms of our hands.

 

 

 

Dear sister,

 

I was born first,

 

then you.

 

And I often wish it was the other way around.

 

 

 

But maybe Mother’s sweet affection

 

isn’t palatable

 

for more than a fraction of a second

 

anyway.

 

 

 

And maybe

 

there is beauty

 

in the black of a howling kettle,

 

in the numbness of a clouded night sky,

 

or in the asphalt that fills the earth’s lungs.

 

 

 

Or at least,

 

maybe it’s beautiful

 

that even when beauty is gone,

 

I will always remain.

 

 

 

Love,

 

Darkness