In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

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

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.”

I lie back on the sun-warm log. 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.

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.”

Sometimes you agonize over something. You war inside yourself trying to defeat uncertainty. Then you look around, and the field of battle is deserted and you’ve been striking vainly at the air. And there’s nothing before you but a path marked Uncertainty. I guess uncertainty isn’t always something you can conquer. Sometimes it’s a path you have to take.

Within a few minutes, her breathing slows and she goes limp in sleep. This happens to her sometimes when we’re together. She saves up vigilance for the times she doesn’t feel safe—it’s what I used to do—and it all comes crashing down when she’s in a secure place, a burden she can no longer bear. You’re her safe harbor. You’re where she can rest. I knew, on some level, what it would mean to her if I went with her. But it didn’t really sink in until now. She sat by me at my mama’s funeral, holding my hand, a faint violet bruise on her cheekbone, where one of her mama’s boyfriends had knocked her around. We were always meant to be side by side in this world for as long as we could be. Always.

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.

“I love you.” He falters as he says it, but not as if doubting what he is saying. Like someone who believes what they’re saying so much that saying it doesn’t feel like enough. There’s only so much weight words can bear.

As we turn into the boat pullout, I’m certain this is the final time I’ll ever be on the river with my papaw. But then he turns and asks me quietly if I’ll scatter his ashes on the river when he’s gone, as we did with my mama, and I know that this is the second-to-last time I’ll ever be in this hallowed place with him.

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.

hear in my mind the swish of the boat cutting through the water, a whisper of a thing that returns to perfection the moment we leave it. I like knowing there are bodies whose scars heal completely right in front of you. I expect I’ll need that reminder in the days to come.

I’d thought about how funny it would be if when you got to heaven, God could give you a printout with all of your life’s vital statistics. How much hair you produced. How many colds you defeated. How many times you skinned your knees. How many nightmares you endured. How many pancakes you ate. Every brave thing you did. Every heartbreak you overcame. Everyone you mourned. Everyone you ever loved. Everyone who ever loved you.

I hoped to dream of sun-drenched days, laughing in the company of new friends, surrounded by love and opportunity. But we don’t choose our dreams; they choose us. So instead I dream of doors sealed by death and wake up sweating in the mute darkness, my roommate sleeping in blissful oblivion a few feet away and a world apart. 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.

Aunt Betsy’s words echo in my head: Fear tells you to make your life small. Don’t give it the air to survive. But I’m giving it a lot of air today—I’m basically pumping a bellows on it.

I 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’re okay for now and I’m relieved. Still, I’m terrified a day will come when we never hug and make up after a fight. I don’t know what I’ll do if that happens. I have more experience grieving the dead than the living.

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. Find it.

Sometimes you get used to hurting, the way you acclimate to excessively cold or hot water, and then it’s the absence of it you notice.

I want someone who knows me like she does—all the ways I’m weak and strong—and still loves me in spite of and also because of it.

It’s one of those tranquil days when the river reflects the brisk blue of the December sky and the pale winter sun, and the wind ripples the face of the water like brushstrokes on a painting. You look at it all and you hope maybe there’ll come a day when no trouble seems very important anymore and this is all you see when your mind goes still.

It feels like he’s bequeathing me an inheritance of the only wealth he possesses—his memories, his quiet joys.

He pauses once more, and with what remains of himself, says, “There was a last time I held you in my arms, and I didn’t even know it.”

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

She tells me, “Sometimes God has to take a life apart before he can put it back together.” And I think how God’s been hard at work taking my life apart for all my life. I’m still waiting for the putting-back-together part.

Laid out like this, Papaw’s existence was quiet and small, but it was a life defined by the love he gave and got. It was the life he wanted.

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.

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.

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

Dear Cash, also called Mickey Mouse, I never had the gift of words like you. But sometimes words is all you get to leave behind, so here goes nothing. I wanted you to know how much I loved our talks together and whatever we spent time doing. I loved canoeing the Pigeon and walking the woods with you. You lit up my life every day. Sending you off to school was the hardest thing I ever did. I’m proud as can be that you were brave enough to go. I know you wanted to stay with us, but I’m glad you saw more of the world. I wish I could be sure of what happens to us after we’re gone. But if we have a soul that lives on, then my soul will keep loving you, even if I smoked and cussed too much to get to heaven. I hope you grow up to be the good man I know you’ll be. I’ll be watching you by your side as much as I can. Sometimes when you weren’t looking I would stare at you and thank God in my heart that I got to be your papaw. Those were the best years of my life. I wish I’d gotten more of them. Love, Phillip E. Pruitt P.S. Take care of your mamaw and see that Tess gets the letter I wrote her. Tess is a special girl. Always treat her good.

I don’t know how I’ll do this. I barely managed when I was only cracked. Now I’m broken wide open.

“It’s okay to let yourself feel what you feel. Where we’re from, men and boys are told to bury any sign of weakness, and feeling things is sometimes seen as weakness. But I promise you, it’s not.”

“Now, more than ever, is the time to turn to poetry. It doesn’t demand that you fix anything or come to any conclusions. It only asks you to observe and sit with what you feel. And with grief, there are no fixes. No conclusions. We can only sit with it.”

I guess you don’t get good at mourning. There are no grieving muscles you can train. You start over each time.

I’m realizing that every triumph, large and small, that I have from now until the day I die will be diminished, if only a little, by my inability to share it with him.

But we don’t hang up immediately. We’re quiet for a while, listening to each other breathe. There’s relief in hearing someone you love still breathing.

I hold every memory of him like a match I let burn down to the end, singeing my fingers until it hurts too much to hold.

If we teach our students nothing else, let it be to do what is right, even when it is difficult and dangerous.”

I’ll still have holes in my life. But I’m ready to try to patch the holes in my life with courage.

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.

“I’m so proud of you,” she says. “I just did the right thing.” “This world needs more men who do the right thing.”

Why is feeling so terrifying that we try to stop it? Feeling is a thing that’s ours only, a thing we don’t borrow.