This Raging Light

by Estelle Laure

How does a person go from being like a decorative component in the house that is your life – a nice table, perhaps – to being the pipes, the foundation, the center beam without which the entire structure falls apart? How does a barely noticeable star become your very own sun?

There is a scar now on my arm, where he touched me. It forms on my skin, watery blue, shimmery sort of, like how burns get shiny sometimes, after. How the burnt skin is new at the same time as

‘Just because the crack doesn’t show doesn’t mean it’s not there.’

Music carries the weight of being human, takes it away so you don’t have to think at all, you just have to listen. Music tells every story there is.

Memories slip, you know, if you don’t take the time to find a way to make them stay.

But in the end I am still me and he is still him, and our bodies come apart and his hand is on the doorknob, his backpack on one shoulder, the night on my face. Then nothing.

Eternity lives in pauses.

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”’

Most people totter their whole lives. They never let themselves fall, never take the hit. They just go along, trying to do what they think they’re supposed to. They never try to find out what’s true for them, because that would mean being brave in a way people aren’t.’

Maybe we’re all breakable. It’s just a question of what breaks us.

Get through it. Just get through this day. Worry about the other ones later.

‘Secrets are bad news. Everybody has them, I think. Or they have things they don’t want to share about themselves, things they aren’t ready to tell. Some things stay special longer when they’re private. But some other things, they get rotten when you can’t say,

You know how people talk about crying sometimes feeling like waves rolling over them? I’ve never understood that until now, but when the first wave hits me, it’s like I’m holding. I’m holding on and gritting against it. My eyes fill and I won’t – won’t let the tears win. But then they do, and I give in. They burst past everything, and I gasp like I’m choking on them and then I sob. Big, gulping sobs that I can’t control.

It’s bananas what paint does, how it makes everything better.

Explain to me what the point of living is if you aren’t willing to fight for the truths in your heart, to risk getting hurt. You have to rage.