Eclipse

It is the night of my 18th birthday and I am on fire.

After collapsing into my skeleton of a bed, the black wireframe creaking like a cage of weary bones, and rapidly dropping into an oppressive sleep, my body had forced itself into a conscious state again at one am. I know this because I am staring at the pill-shaped alarm clock on my bedside table, its red glow spelling my fate in harsh fluorescent lines. 

The blankets are hot and heavy around my legs. It feels nice in a sweaty, consuming kind of way. I don’t usually let myself feel so unclean. 

My scorching feet meet the chilled wooden floor, it bites with a vengeance as I navigate the dark room with practiced familiarity. I am a flaming apparition as I roam through my doorway and trod down the hall, past family portraits with my toes searing into fluffy carpet. I’m passing the vacant bathroom, pink and flowery wallpaper devoid of light, where I had turned the lock in the small golden doorknob hours earlier and forced myself to sob slick streams down my cheeks, crouched in the bathtub. I had tired myself out, but the feeling had not left my body, and I feel it now still. I wonder if growing up will always hurt like this.

A faint yellow porch light illuminates the splintering wooden staircase I’ve found myself rooted to, bare knees meeting at the intersection of my goose-bump flecked legs. It’s quiet, the silence interrupted only by the rustling of dead brown leaves against barren branches and the scintillating of a wind chime hanging around the front of the house. Twinkling chimes and wind that is cold like water, or a ghostly embrace that prickles me. My skin. 

Leaning my head against the back door, faded white and old, I roll my neck until the short dent in the back of my skull catches on the wall and holds me in place. Breath escapes my lungs in thick clouds of mist that rise and dissipate in the air. 

I look up into the sky that becomes space at some point, burning, freezing, matter, and void. What is this feeling? Wanting for the world I had as a child, as easy as cupping river water in my palm and knowing it would taste like the omen of rain. I’m scared of this new world that awaits me. The realization hurts, but the tenderness of the thought stings nicely. Words blister up through my throat and eventually, there’s no place for them but out.

I whisper, “Please come get me, I can’t take it.”

I hesitate, half-hoping this confession will spawn a creature into existence, something large and encompassing and maybe warm. Warm and soft and comforting, loving. We all just want to be cared for most of all. 

Isn’t it so strange to look up for rescue? The only thing bigger than us that we can fathom is up, up, up. An infinity to rival the celestial body in our chests. Perhaps for some, the stars smile back, but for me, they sparkle a cold abyss. Both can be so comforting and so painful. 

My mind is so small and the world is so big - and yet they are mirrors of each other. Both happening all the time and ever-expanding into something more, more, more. 

Changing, progressing. There is no going backward.

Why do I want to assign divinity to the waking world? Am I lonely? Scared that I’m all grown up and in control? Do I really need justification to live? I don’t know. Maybe the universe just is. Maybe we create so much meaning in spite of an uncaring universe so that the weight of our doubt weighs a little less heavy.

Maybe one day I’ll be sixty and none of this will matter as much. Maybe it will only matter more. 

The porch light attracts a single moth that I watch encircle the space high off the ground where the porch light juts off the wall. The moth’s flight pattern is desperate, its fluttering wings pattering urgently against the thick, hot plastic. No other bugs have ventured to the porch tonight, the moth is alone. My features fall soft as I consider what plays out in front of me. In elementary school, I’d learned that moths are drawn to light because they think it’s the moon. That’s the running theory, at least. They use the light to navigate their reality, having unforeseen little moons everywhere. It might not even know what draws itself to the glowing beacon. An instinctual want, so mindlessly powerful that to defy it would break the rule of nature. 

The rule of self. 

The moth falls suddenly, landing in the grass only a few inches from the edge of the splintering wooden stairs. I lean over, porch creaking, arms supporting my weight as I edge my gaze forward and then down. My hands are slow and gentle as they reach for the moth’s fragile, powdery body, which is no longer moving. Cradling its paper-thin wings between my palms, I raise it closer to the light. The moth shimmers charcoal black, dark lines weaving their way into curved patterns across its wings and body. Two antennae hang lifeless over my fingers.

Night feels like a dream sometimes, like magic. The curtain between the physical world and imagination thins until I feel a tangle of fervorous electricity build in my stomach, you feel it don’t you? In small extraordinary moments that feel so crucial and personal. The way your mother’s hands feel in your hair. The searing intimacy of eye contact. 

Night smells like damp earth and a hypnotizing otherness when there’s no one around to remind me who I’m supposed to be. It’s easier to remember who I am. 

So profoundly human.

It is cold at night, so I bring the moth inside.

We tiptoe through the house on baby fox steps, the night has cooled my feet to temperate husks but my steps are heavier now, determined and just a little bit dazed. We reach my room in 17 seconds. My eyes have adjusted to the dark, a tall rectangle of blue moonlight shines on the foot of my bed where I didn’t notice it before, I have forgotten to pull my curtains shut. I feel hurried all of a sudden, my heart rate rushing to catch up with the pulse of my feeling. My ankle hooks around the leg of my desk chair and I sit with sudden focus. I click my lamp on but no light occurs. My brow furrowing, I lean over the side to see that the plug has fallen out of the outlet. This, for some reason, fills me with frustrated exhaustion so strong I almost collapse.

I find myself preening with jealousy at the sight of something so small, so cared for, within my shivering grasp. Maybe I would like to be studied, mesmerized, to be scooped up, and put to my purpose. Singled out and seen. We all just want to be cared for most of all.

The feeling in my body remains, a harsh knot in my chest that will remain unseen, loosened only with time and resolve.

An 18th birthday is the beginning of the end of the world. It is devastating and charged with the removal of an illusion that has lasted your whole life. As the old world dies, memories still rich and hoarse, born in its place is something bigger, stranger, harder. We have been losing our childhoods for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s a cruel setup, it is. To be given life so pure and bony and raw, then to complicate it with the inevitability of falling apart, the drive of purpose, death. Yet there must be so much hope and love in owning your humanity, I think. 

I scoot away from my desk, which scrapes with a volume better suited to waking hours, but I only regret it a little. Backtracking towards my bed, I let myself fall onto my back on the twin-sized mattress with a long exhale out of my nostrils. Tears wet my cheeks.

Can’t I dream just a little more?

I ask this question of no one, of everyone, my eyes trained on the beam of moonish light shining down my face and onto my lap. I am a god-less being at a broken, midnight altar.

“Is it supposed to be like this?”

On the desk, there is the sound of paper-thin wings pattering against the sturdy tabletop. A fluttering so soft I almost miss it, but then I am straightening up, arms extended behind me, blinking to let in the dark. It is a tiny black silhouette on my wall. Its wings flash, a reflection against the night, and now it is floating, staggering, lurching across the room. My eyes follow the moth bestow its loyalty to the radiant moon as it finally lands, right in the center of my window. It is an obsidian deity, staining the glass. Tears wet my chin.

There is a little voice inside me that answers; Maybe. Maybe not. But this is how it is.