In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

“Because for every way the world tries to kill us, it gives us a way to survive. You just gotta find it.”

Life has given me little reason to feel large, but I see no need to make myself feel smaller.

Plenty’s fallen in your lap you didn’t deserve. This isn’t one of those things. Let the Lord bless you with one good thing to make up for all the rest.”

“Death’s all around us. We live our whole lives in its shadow. It’ll do what it will. So we need to do what we will while we can.”

respiration. Ask me to number the breaths I wish for you. One more. Ask me a thousand times. The answer will always be one more.

But the quiet is just another clamor in my head, calling me in every direction I can’t choose between.

There are days when your heart is so filled with this world’s beauty, it feels like holding too much of something in your hand. Days that taste like wild honey.

Here we are, survivors of quiet wars. Like trees that have weathered a brutal storm, but with broken branches and fallen blossoms littering the ground around us.

“Death is frightening and I know how tempting it is to let fear guide our steps.”

“You’ll never regret a decision more than the one you make out of fear. Fear tells you to make your life small. Fear tells you to think small. Fear tells you to be small-hearted. Fear seeks to preserve itself, and the bigger you let your life and perspective and heart get, the less air you give fear to survive.”

“I don’t want to live a fearful life,”

I’ve seen that life is filled with unimaginable horror. But it’s also threaded through with unimaginable wonder. Live through enough of the one, maybe you’re due some of the other.

Carry off my fear like it’s sin. Fill my reservoir of courage. Cleanse me of doubt. Make me strong enough to cut myself a path through the world, like you. Remind me that there are things I love that can last. Goodbye.

This must be what it’s like to die. You look around you and see how much of what you love you leave behind.

It’s exactly as I imagined: a place I could never imagine myself being.

“Stick how you feel right up your ass,” she says loudly.

This is where you can find sanctuary when you need it. And you’ll need it.

But we don’t choose our dreams; they choose us.

Memory is a tether. Sometimes you get some slack in the line and you can play it out for a while. You forget and think you’re free. But you’ll always get to the end and realize it’s still there, binding you, reminding you of itself, reminding you that you belong to each other.

but anxiety is winning out, gripping me like a snare that tightens the more I strain against it.

there’s a slight stirring deep in me, the rise of a wind you don’t notice until it rattles the leaves around you.

chisel it into my mind to run my fingers over later.

see in you someone who wants to experience joy and is having a tough time doing that right now. Life often won’t freely give you moments of joy. Sometimes you have to wrench them away and cup them in your hands, to protect them from the wind and rain. Art is a

pair of cupped hands. Poetry is a pair of cupped hands.”

“Every hurt, every sorrow, every scar has brought you here. Poetry lets us turn pain into fire by which to warm ourselves. Go build a fire.”

We think of language as this tame thing that lives in neat garden beds, bound by rules and fences. Then someone shows it to you growing wild and beautiful, flowering vines consuming cities, erasing pavement and lines. Breaking

I think on our passing through the night over the pulverized bones of long-buried loves and memories, and it’s an oddly soothing idea—that the world forgets all of our wounds and aches so completely you eventually can’t distinguish them from dust.

There is beauty in every wound.

Delaney reaches over and brushes a tear from my cheek and holds it up to the light of the window like she’s appraising a diamond. “Tears have the same salinity as seawater.”

laughed, out loud.

This is what you remember of the people you love when they’re gone—the ways they knew you that no one else did—even you. In that way, their passing is a death of a piece of yourself.

I can choose them. I can choose to stay.

There are secret fires you wall off because you fear what they’ll burn if you loose them. Because you choose caution over possibility. But at the first crack in the wall, you feel their warmth and decide you’ll gladly risk the burning.

You are not a creature of grief. You are not a congregation of wounds. You are not the sum of your losses. Your skin is not your scars. Your life is yours, and it can be new and wondrous. Remember that.”

I once thought of memory as a tether. I still do, in a way. But now I also see memory as the roots from which you grow toward the sun.