Understanding

December 15th 

The coldness radiates through the winter air, striking her veins as Piper watches her  husband's casket be lowered slowly into the earth. Suits and dresses are circled by leafless trees, acquaintances in their finest black to mourn a man and console a woman they never truly knew. The lone tear that drips slowly down Piper’s face is reflected in the stunning brown of Micca’s coffin as the mid-December sun fails to bring anything back to life.

Piper is silent, unable to speak, while Micca’s family swap stories and tales of who her husband once was. She thinks back to the first time they met, young and full of ambition, reflecting how they nourished each other's souls and worshiped their temporary bodies throughout the time they spent together. How, the first time he laid his eyes on her, he whispered, “Who is this angel?” while he gently touched her golden blonde hair. His eyes, she remembered thinking, is a place I could get lost in for eternity. And she did. Now, here she stands, 30 years, that flew by too quickly, later, graying as she threw her last handful of dirt onto where her beloved's body lay. 

As the afternoon light dwindles and the crowd disperses with silent nods, she’s still standing there thinking. How could one moment be stagnant and secure, while the next is engulfed in pure grief that came from a phone call? How could her husband be planning what to cook for dinner, and then gone? She questions and rationalizes until the stars peak out and caress her slightly wrinkled face, winking as if this is some kind of cosmic joke.

The drive home is silent. Stars follow her in a manner that has Piper questioning whether she’s alone. She feels sets of eyes blinking, eyelashes fluttering against her skin until she reaches her and Micca’s home. Painted white with paint-chipped gray shutters, their house stands on expansive land, bordered by woods, all of which is dead and gray. She thinks about how, during the summer, she and Micca would get lost in their woods for hours, chasing each other, walking and holding hands. She remembers how their children would run and explore for hours to be called back by Micca signaling dinner.

 Turning her car off, Piper gazes blankly ahead as the bare trees sway. She listens to the night air, pretending she’s listening to Micca’s soft voice, and gentle breath caressing her ear. The wind glides through the trees, swaying slowly, creating the smallest sound in a barren property. With a heavy sigh she walks through the chestnut doors that she's walked through a thousand times and puts her bag on the chair. Gazing out the large windows, the stars still mock her, and the trees still sway. 

After changing into one of Micca’s shirts, Piper pours a glass of Merlot and sits down on the couch. She looks out the oversized windows that span the diameter of the wall one after another, remembering how Micca was so thrilled when he built this house to have an entire side of the living room transparent; “It’s as if we are actually living within the woods, not just on the woods,” he would say. A few hours pass by in a haze of buzzing wine and tunneling thoughts as Piper desperately tries to memorize Micca’s face, when she notices a flash of light pushing through the atmosphere. The light is the size of the tip of a ball-point pen, so subtle but bright enough for Piper to pause her thoughts. 

December 20th 

The days are blending as Piper wanders soulessly, switching between merlot and meekly existing. Her children have tried to call with dwindling incessant urgency, while Micca’s parents have wholly given up since the accident.  I can’t do this without Micca, she thinks with constant fervor. She wonders desperately if something would be kind enough to come take her away. Looking out her window tonight, she focuses those wonders on the potential for the trees to take her all the way up to where that tiny ball of light pulses. 

She thinks about her children. Micca was always the thread that held their family together, while Piper shallowly watched from the outside. She would watch Micca coo to their children in their infancy, and laugh with them as they graduated college while she stood by marveling how she created such a reality for herself. Such a reality that is now gone- it was the only one where she has ever felt truly alive. 

The blinking clock reads  “2:45 A.M.” and she glances up from her chair. The light pulses through the claws of the highest peak of the trees, appearing slightly brighter than it’s been the past couple of days. Slightly larger. Is it closer? It appears to be. 

December 24th

It’s Christmas Eve, and Piper should feel low, and utterly consumed, but she’s not, because she’s not alone. Every night she sat and observed this light moving closer and closer, ever so slowly ripping a bigger hole in the sky. It feels as if the light takes the day to recharge as Piper sleeps, and greets her with a warm welcome when night falls.  She pours her first glass of wine and gazes outside, thinking about the light, talking out loud to Micca, saying, “If only you could see this!” 

The light is wiggling tonight, looking sizably larger, about the size of a quarter, fighting for space in the sky with the full moon that hangs low. The brown grass is illuminated in a blue glow from the competing forces, causing the inside of Piper’s house to be bathed in chrome with shadows peeking from where shapes overlap. The shadows lick at Piper’s shoulders from where she sits facing her light. But she doesn’t mind. As long as her light is wiggling and the moon whispers, she's content to be still.

December 25th

Piper wakes to the ringing on her phone. “Lily” the screen reads, her daughter. A fresh wave of grief overcomes her as she stares blankly at her phone screen, wishing her light was there to guide her, but it was morning, and the sun mocked her. Answering the phone with shaking hands, she brings it gently up to her ear.

“Hello?” Piper croaks out.

“Hi, Mom,” Lily defeatedly greets, “I haven’t heard from you in a while; Merry Christmas.”

Christmas, that’s right. “Oh, Lily, Merry Christmas to you too,” Piper responds.

“Do you want to come over? We are hosting this year with everything that happened. Dad would have wanted us to still have a good Christmas,” Lily tries to explain with half-hearted hopefulness, while all Piper can think of is that her husband is not here. 

“Mom?”

The first Christmas spent in this house was one of the most beautiful memories of Piper’s life. Micca and she just moved in and boxes were against the wall, random articles of clothing and knick-knacks strewn haphazardly about the house. Without a care in the world, she and Micca sat on the floor criss-crossed with champagne and popcorn, and simply existed in their first home together. Every Christmas after brought presents, love, champagne, chocolate, and, eventually, children, family, and in-laws. It was perfect. They were perfect.

“Sorry, honey, but I just don’t have it in me to come out,” Piper says. “Please give everyone my best. Love you.”

Piper hung up, cursed the sun, and went to bed. 

When she awoke, the house was cast in inky black with two soft beams of light. As Piper approached her window where her chair still faced outward she was met with two quarter-sized spots of light hanging in that same spot among the trees. Two? Her light seemed to have doubled. Piper reaches, stretching her hand out in the beams of light that illuminated the floating dust in her house, and wiggles. Her forearm now glowed bright gold, while the rest of her house still sat in heavy blackness. Wiggling her arm more, she fanned her fingers out to play with the dust. The light was a comfort, whispering to her how it will all be alright, and to just sit back, and watch them dance in the night sky. So she did.

December 30th

She simply can’t believe her eyes. Every night when she’s woken up she has been met with heavy melancholy mixed with grief sitting on her chest, but that has shortly been replaced with soft murmurs of her ever-growing lights. The life-like growth she has been witness to fuels her drive to keep going every day, just to see night consume her world. Her two little balls of light have grown to be the size of two basketballs suspended within the trees. The surrounding branches used to cause silhouettes in front of the light, creating cutouts of sharp, jagged, shapes; the light, now, was placed in front of the trees hiding the clawed branches behind it. It came closer and closer to her house every night, not just larger and larger in the sedentary spot in the sky. She wants to touch it.

Tonight is particularly cold with while delicate, fat flakes of snow light up the world white. Snow coats the trees in a way that makes everything appear heavier and otherworldly. The bright yellow glow of her lights hurt her eyes, but she can't look away. They’re pulsing, pulsing, slowly then quickly as if they can’t wait to touch her. She can’t wait to touch them too. Then, suddenly, with magnified precision, they break off and form a third circle-shaped light source, all pulsing in perfect synchronicity. 

January 2d 

Every night feels like singing, every night feels like craving something more. Micca dances along the periphery of her mind while her lights consume her every thought. And it’s beautiful. The three yellow spheres come closer, faster, with more urgency than before, and begin to blanket her entire window. They are all she can see and feel. She throws back her head, baring the column of her failed throat as they whisper to her such sweet nothings. They start to morph cohesively into three peaked shapes, slowly, uniformly, forming mirrored, pointed tips, as if they are vertical stars. With a perfectly symmetrical top and bottom, the peaks come to sharp, yet softer, points resembling a diamond. Her lights have transformed into something of the cosmos. 

Her mouth waters at the sight of her personal celestial lovers. They throb in time with her own heartbeat and she finds herself walking out the door into the cold, windy night. As she walks barefoot with only Miccas shirt on she feels like she can breathe in, and out, in, and out, and feels like she can finally resurrect her desire to be happy. Micca is with her in this moment. The proof is within the feeling of his trembling finger on her cheek stroking lovingly in the way he did when they laid in bed.

20 short footsteps later and she’s fallen in front of her three stars. They reach out and tickle under her chin, eliciting a girlish giggle that comes out strained and hoarse from Pipers unused vocal chords. She smiles for the first time in weeks as her lights tell her jokes and remind her that she will reunite with Micca again. They whirr and hum and pulse with her. We love you, they speak into her mind in perfect sync. I love you, too. Piper takes a step forward and is engulfed in a sheen of white, a blinding, innate love perfectly balanced with the universe, stars, and endless expansion. Her atmosphere is split open, tethering one part of herself to another with a string of twinkling silver, as her beings of cosmic light encapsulate her. She is brought into an intrinsic embrace, of scalding radiancy, causing the whites of her eyes pool into her iris, covering up her previous green. She looks up. She now, with finality, understands.