A Lily in the Light

by Kristin Fields

Working toward something that seems impossible makes it more of an accomplishment.

What you do when you’re not here counts as much, if not more, as what you do when you’re here.

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.

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

What I’m trying to say, Esme, is that there’s a place for everything you’re feeling.”

“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.

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.

don’t have to feel bad, she reminded herself, for living the life I was given.

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.

We write our own journey.

For as long as she danced, she would never be near enough, and she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to be.

aware of the light falling over her back, struck by the idea that sometimes great journeys ended in the same place they began.

She’d finally had a place to tell her story without words but with an audience to listen. Carrying it alone again would be unbearable, so she tucked the pain into all the old familiar places until she was just Esme again, pure white from a distance.

wise woman once told me that if I could dance through the hardest part of my life, I could dance through anything. She was right.

Life would be different—not necessarily better, but different.