chasing light
some recent conversations with Emily VanDerWerff dislodged a memory and I wanted to write about it. celebrate the final days of Pride month by donating to a local bail fund and not doing just passive support things for BLM—reading isn’t enough. xo, ee
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During dusk the other night, I drove to the grocery store. It’s firefly season here now, and once I turned onto the rural highway a solitary firefly hit my windshield, leaving a bioluminescent skidmark on the windshield which caught the drifting tail of the sunset behind it and held my eye. I drove the rest of the way distracted by it, checking now and again to see if it was still glowing. It went out shortly before I pulled into the Kroger parking lot, and I missed its final flicker and fade.
I have always been easily distracted by light. Dust motes floating in a sunbeam like jellyfish in water occupied hours of my childhood Sunday afternoons, their drifting better than music, more enchanting than a book or a nap. Whole worlds could occupy a sunbeam, and who was I to let them go unrecognized, unobserved?
So it was a fairly average moment for me when, at nine years old, I was coming home from an afternoon at a friend’s house after church and we were riding in her family’s van with some of her brothers on our way to drop me off at home. It was summer, and the air was dry and the sunlight long and lean and ferocious until it curled up behind the long fields outside of town for the night. We were driving just before sunset and the car didn’t have air conditioning and we were rowdy, hot, fractious.
My friend was a short girl with toasted white girl summer pool child skin and flaxen floss blond hair. Wedged next to her in the backseat, my arm was pressed against hers and we were comparing our tans--mine was barely present as I spent most summer days reading and she spent hers in her family’s above ground pool. But above her skin on her forearms lay a soft forest of white blond baby hairs and we laughed about petting it as we compared our tans and then I said the thing I had always wanted to say to her.
“Michelle, I love how your arm hairs are so blond that sometimes when the sunlight catches them just right, they sparkle a little. It’s so pretty.”
“Oh my GOD she’s a LESBIAN,” said one of the boys ahead of me.
“EW GAY,” said another, sitting shotgun.
For some reason, in my memory I expect to remember the parent driving the car weighing in, reprimanding them. But all I hear is the radio playing the Christian station, the turn signal ticking, the AC fans blasting on high.
Next to me, Michelle was also quiet. I took a long breath, trying to think of what to say, and as I did she pulled away from me slightly, still holding her forearm with her other hand. She pulled the arm close to her chest and pressed it there, looking away from me out the window. My mouth felt dry, and then sour. I wanted to catch her eye, to reassure her.
“I don’t think I am,” I said, “I don’t think I am a lesbian. I just thought it looked cool.” I thought about what I knew of this term--almost nothing except that my mother’s sister was one and she dressed like my dad did most of the time, khakis, polo shirt tucked in, leather belt. She was single, and kind but sometimes gruff. “My aunt is a lesbian,” I volunteered. “She won’t ever wear dresses and sometimes I like dresses, so I don’t think I am one.”
Michelle turned to me now. “Well whatever, you made me very uncomfortable.” She was scooting a little further from me in the seat, and I obliged by moving away a little myself. I just wanted her to feel comfortable, for things to go back to normal.
The boys had moved on already--someone had farted and they were drowning out my embarrassment with their mouth farts and armpit farts and laughter.
At my house, I went to hug Michelle goodbye, but she was stiff. “Bye,” she said quietly, not looking directly at me still.
I’d forgotten this conversation and the aftermath of it until the other morning, Summer Solstice 2020, when the sun was being eclipsed by the moon in other hemispheres and I was sitting in the sun on my lawn, reading poetry for a few minutes until I nearly sunburned. My skin is still pale, and while some body hair has darkened, the tiny soft hairs on my belly and thighs are still translucently white. In the sunlight, they sparkled, the iridescence casting miniscule rainbows against the skin surrounding each follicle base. I chuckled to myself--amused that I’m still so easily distracted by this phenomenon, over twenty years later--and then my breath caught and I remembered.
Remembered how Michelle stopped inviting me over, how a mutual friend was sent to tell me that Michelle was uncomfortable around me now and I shouldn’t count on her friendship anymore, how then the entire faction of city dwelling white girls in our Sunday School--the ones with lace on the edges of their socks and mothers who curled their hair for them sometimes--just started avoiding me, leaving me to ally with a Scout Finch-type girl who exclusively wore overalls and cowboy boots as each other’s only recourse against the mean girls and the pranks their brothers would pull on us when the Sunday School teacher wasn’t watching. Remembered how none of them stayed in touch with me a couple years later when my father moved us to Virginia.
Remembered how many girls told me they would love me if they weren’t straight, how they kissed me when drunk, how they held me so softly after a night out with friends, how they kissed my neck in the bathroom, and held my hand later on the street corner, and how they talked to me constantly of their boyfriends the whole time, only to disappear from my life over the most arbitrary, unanticipated slights just when I thought we had come to an understanding, a truce unspoken where I would never tell them I wanted them and they would never acknowledge that desire had other shapes than the one they were accustomed to show the world.
Remembered the way the streetlights lit up droplets caught in their hair as mist fell on us at night in Brooklyn, remembered how they fell silent when I asked for more time, for trips planned or a weekend away. Remembered that I hold all their secrets, and that my truth doesn’t need to rot in that gallery of closed doors with them. I remembered all this, after all, on the day best observed by celebrating the gaze of light on our selves and the ways we have exercised our power through the past lengthening days of the year. I’ll keep looking for new ways to see myself in the light.