The dazzling core
After it is all over and the body rots or is burned away or pumped full of chemicals and covered in makeup as a way to convince those who are left that the loved one still exists, light remains. The flash at death, the speed up to space, the dissipation of the distilled self: once freed, light moves at its own dazzling pace.
This is life, the essence, the sparkle, the dance. Contained in a body for ten years or 41 or 87, confined by contingent flesh, pulled along through various circumstances (happy childhoods, punch-drunk marriages, depressions of the emotional or monetary types), the light whips out of the withered husk, the self it used to be, at first opportunity.
Does light remember? Are we contained in hundreds of points of light in the night sky, stardust? Starlight? I’m still trying out this theory on myself, this idea that maybe there is an underlying spiritual layer, matterless, pure light, the mystery of life underneath the machines that are our bodies.
Light does not remember. Light exists, mysterious, animating, strong, the substrate, the core, but once it leaves a body, it breaks into a million different pieces. Or waves. Who we are scatters across the universe, to be gathered in a different configuration and shot into a body again. Maybe.
But it doesn’t end, light. It hurtles, it makes us who we are, it is the purest thing about us. Don’t cover the light. Try your best to see it, to acknowledge it through the worst of circumstances. Let it simultaneously ground you and lift you. And don’t get too attached. Light resists containment. It is not individual. We exist in a community of waves, of commonalities, sparks underneath the surface.
From a prompt: It never ends. I went with something positive and never-ending. A change of pace. Lightly edited from yesterday morning's original.
Image: Me, the mirror and the flash.