In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

Some aren’t okay with not understanding everything. But I’m not afraid of a world filled with mystery.

I’ve always loved when the light finds the broken spots in the world and makes them beautiful.

I once saw a bird that had been run down in the road. It lay there, pulverized. But

the wind caught two of its feathers and lifted them free of the destroyed body, breathing life back into them. I watched those feathers dancing in the wind for a long time, such unexpected grace amid ruin.

I began to see something in Delaney that I’d never seen in another person. I can’t name that thing. Maybe it has no name, the way fire has no shape. It was something ferocious and consuming, like fire. And I wanted to be close to it, the way people want to stand near a fire.

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

“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.”

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. This is one of them.

When you grow up with ugliness and corruption, you surrender to beauty whenever and wherever you find it. You let it save you, if only for the time it takes for a snowflake to melt on your tongue or for the sun to sink below the horizon in a wildfire of clouds. No matter what else might be troubling your mind. You recognize it for something that can’t be taken from you. Something that can’t die with its back against a door, shutting you out in its final act.

She already looks like a memory in the gilded, hazy summer light.

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.

“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.”

We were always meant to be side by side in this world for as long as we could be. Always.

Would I? Would it be better to know that someone you never thought loved you did love you? Or would it be worse to know that someone you always thought loved you didn’t?

Sometimes a clear day will cloud up without your noticing, until a gust of rain-scented wind nearly steals your balance. That’s how the homesickness hits my center of gravity in that moment.

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.

A gust of wind lightly rattles the window, followed by a constellation of rain on the glass. Tripp either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, and I’m glad to have this bit of minor holiness all to myself.

I think on the wonder of things expanding to fill the universe, even as they’re being folded in half.

I don’t know how to live under the sun of a God whose harvest is everyone I love.

I wish our love was enough to keep whole the people we love.

Some people can lift your heart up to the light, reading the truth of you written on it. I was afraid that being a man meant waging war on what’s beautiful. I wanted to love the world without taking anything from it.

“Someday, someone I try to save is going to let me.”

Not one expresses the completeness of the idea it represents, the way apple represents the completeness of an apple and river represents the completeness of a river. They all leave something unsaid. They all have some phantom limb that reminds you of their lack. Don’t they know how much I loved him?

You pass through enough defeat, it feels like you’ll never taste victory’s sweetness. But then somehow you do, and for at least that moment, you can’t even remember a time when it wasn’t on your lips.

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.