A Lily in the Light

by Kristin Fields

Memories drifting into forgottenness seemed unspeakably sad.

Everything’s fine until something important is snipped away from your life like a magazine cutout, and then everything you ever did will feel like air, and you can just blow it all away.

If you can dance through this, you can dance through anything.

How could the same people who’d left sloppy tuna casseroles in glass dishes say these things about her family?

Everything she needed was here, without asking, and all she had to do was grow.

Maybe Esme was wrong; it hadn’t come from her mother at all. Her mother had only watered something that was already there.

“No matter what it is, even if it’s just an idea, everything starts with your head, and your head starts here.” Andre tapped the place where his heart would be.

“Look at your mother. No matter how sad she feels, when she sews, only beautiful things happen. She makes a lot of people happy because of it. That’s what’s inside your mother, beautiful things, whether she always feels it or not. You and her are the same. There’s only one outcome, Esme, because once you’re in that room and the music starts, you’ll do what your heart wants even if your head is confused, and it will be beautiful too.”

If she could see things the way he saw them, maybe she wouldn’t be so confused.

He hadn’t gotten what he wanted, but he had other things instead. It was impossible to have nothing.

“We don’t always choose our choices, but they’re ours. Am I happy?” He sighed. “Look around. This is a beautiful place, the most beautiful I’ve seen in a long time. I’m here with you, and I’m happy to be. We can’t be everything all the time. That just wouldn’t be life.”

Dancing let her soul breathe. It had always been that way and always would be.

She was not an exception. Anything could happen, and yet she missed the oasis San Francisco used to be before she’d realized, truly realized, how many bad things happened to regular people and wished San Francisco was still as innocent as a beautiful red bridge in the fog.

There was a poem she’d read once about grief, the only one that got it right, that told the world to stop clocks and put away the stars and the ocean because life was over.

It had taken a long time to accept that someone could just be gone.

You’re so fucked up inside, a symphony of misery.

She liked the idea of her father in a garden, surrounded by plants and neighbors.

There wasn’t anything she couldn’t ruin.

Even if she’d wanted to explain, how could she? Yes, it was easier to ride away with someone on a motorcycle in the middle of the night and regret it afterward than it was to sit alone with eight years of grief, easier to push and push and push until her body was physically beat than to feel that missing piece of her

You can be left behind, or you can leave behind.

struck by the idea that sometimes great journeys ended in the same place they began.

It always pained Esme that lilies were so beautiful from far away and disturbing up close. There was nothing harder to look at than a lily in the light.

an ugly thing on the inside after all. And maybe this feeling was why her

The point is we don’t have to live with our pain, Esme. It’s a choice.

Maybe this was the answer to why she danced. It had saved her after Lily had disappeared, and now it would bring them back together again.

She just needs to find her closet full of costumes. Esme thought of that night at Amelia’s. Something that pushes her from the world she knows into the one that comes next. I’ll help you find it, she promised silently. We’ll all help you find it.