A Lily in the Light

by Kristin Fields

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

“Good people can do bad things, and bad people can do good things, so maybe it depends on the choices we make. Even good people can do bad things for good reasons.”

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.

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 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.

“They have something in common, the shell and the glass. They’ve both been pushed around by the ocean. It doesn’t make them any less beautiful or exciting to find, does it? Only more so.”

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

Do you remember that day we wanted to burn driftwood to see if it burned blue?” “Yeah.” “Why did it matter so much?” Esme laughed, remembering how important it’d been at the time to prove such a thing was possible, but she didn’t have an answer. “It wasn’t, but we made it seem important by wanting it so much. If it’s true for the driftwood, it’s true for other things too.