There is a Light That Never Goes Out

by Kali McMillian

There is a place deep in the forest of my unconscious mind, an area thick with roots, a thicket of once tangible hopes, long forgotten experiences, sensations no longer worth sensing. If you bend over and align one eye with the interlacing branches, you’ll see it. It’s far too easy to miss — my graveyard. The slabs of heavy granite fashioned from the poetic nature of a broke heart, and over those failed opportunities of my potential lives, you preside. You weren’t always this hidden. Once, your surfaces met the sun in full, falling through the breaks in my hippocampal canopy. For so long, I labored at each plot, tracing the memories of hurt etched so delicately on your smooth surfaces, allowing the past to influence the present, seeing the world through the haze of your learned distrust. So easily I tripped on your hard edges, holding you too close, visiting you too often. But see, love won’t always wrap its coils around my heart and squeeze, love won’t always take my breath away and hold it out of reach, love won’t always end, or at least I hope so. I close my eyes very tightly, uncomfortably so, and I hope. But as for now? Now there is still a place deep in the forest of my unconscious mind, an area thick with roots. And if you bend over and align one eye with the interlacing branches, you’ll see it — my graveyard. In this place rests the woes of my modern heart, and they will not disappear, and I do not want them to. But they will live in the shadow, removed from a life where the light keeps moving.

* Title after The Smiths’ song