Alicia Baldelli
Spite the Sun for Shining As I walked in the sun today, I recalled the days I’d spite the sun for shining. I could not bear happy faces, and I could not bear beautiful days. How dare the day so graphically contrast with how I felt? The endless cycle of the sun’s rays on their eightminute journey from their place in the solar system to my window’s place in the solar system— arriving only to mock me. The audacity! Days unimpeded by darkness, where the evidence was everywhere of the sun sustaining the plants and warming the cold fingers of humanity which I despised for existing. It came like a slowly rising tide which consumed me just as the foam of ocean waves creep to unexpectedly soak one’s beach belongings. I only noticed the tide after it had taken me out to sea to drown me far away from those still on shore. Yes Netflix, I’m still watching. But whether it was “Breaking Bad,” Chopin’s nocturnes, or headlines of “Two Murdered Halifax Children” —there was nothing anymore. Nothing. The light switch? Off. Only the blackness of my pupils could emulate what I faced. Who I faced. Sure, the blood of a fresh wound demands the attention of necessity, but the human psyche also has a cruel way of making its demands known. “The world is dumb. I think it wouldn’t be so bad if a meteor came and wiped out humanity. Like, whoops. Restart button. Consciousness was a bad idea, abort mission.” I ranted in blue bubbles. But it was me I wanted to be destroyed, the consequence of a man losing meaning; I had strayed far from the light of the straight and narrow path. My gnawed off fingernails and I would gladly fantasize about tearing the curtains down with me, dismantling the very foundation of life with my own descent, even if there was never any fullness of satisfaction to be found in the destruction. Hunger returns without submission.… And then, even the clouds and the rain lost their coddling comfort. The drops began irritating me with their driveling, dangling harp strings tapping an incoherent song on the windowsill. 1-1-3-2-1, 3-1-1-2-2.... Make up your damn mind about what rhythm you want to play! I keep losing count. Will you be a part of the order or not? I felt irritation at anything moving humanity forward. At all of creation unfolding towards that distant dot on the horizon. A hate of self and God and anything residing on that chaseless border of present and future, now and next. I despised my existence and all its reminders, but especially the essential building blocks of sun and water. But I have long since returned to where I belong, with a deepened sense of joy and gratitude. The place where a falling leaf, my mother’s singing in the kitchen by the casserole, that stranger’s tale of woe in the post office line, that booger-nosed child’s scuffed boots, the flickering sunshine spilling in my window, and all that is in me as a woman capable of creating reside, not where the pestilent outlook and impulses of a calloused, suffering, and resentful soul once was.
14 | Windhover 2021
