lessons in forgiveness & light

I tell my mom it feels like I’ve dug myself into a deep hole and I have no idea how to climb out of it. She tells me maybe you’re just standing in a dark room and you need to open the door.

Sometimes, you’ll let grief cool your heart or you’ll be quick to judge or you’ll want to disappear for awhile. You’ll look at how you’ve been treating others or yourself, and think, how did I get here?

It’s easy to get stuck between extremes. I’m sad freshman year is ending—the people I wave to on my way to class, my tiny room, the proximity of it all, the freshness of it all, my soft routines. But I also want it to be done. I remind myself freshman year should not be the best year of my life. It’s a year that has asked a lot of questions, and only given a few answers. Most days, I can’t believe this chapter is nearing completion.

There are two ways to deal with an ending. You can fear it, try to control it, try to predict it, and try to stop it from happening. Or you can acknowledge that things will end whether you’re ready or not. The only thing you can do is to notice what’s here right now.

So I let the light in again. I sleep with the windows open. I start telling people in my life I love them. I go to baseball games with Jackson where we split a corndog and soft pretzel and laugh too loud and cheer for the wrong team. Sofia and I try to catch the sunrise; we’re met with rhododendrons instead. I put myself out there. It doesn’t always work. I find light in Hanna’s laughter, in Maeve’s red rain boots, in a house crammed with a hundred people but I only care about dancing with my friends. Light exists by the Willamette, the Pacific, and all the memories that both of those places hold. I find it in scooter rides with flyaway Katie and dinners with the girls who will be my roommates next year. I find it while upturning earth at the urban farm every Tuesday and Thursday, and on our walks back with fresh kale. Light is taking my mom and grandma to my favorite places. It’s making promises to myself and keeping them. It’s figuring out how to be a better sister, daughter, writer, friend.

I open a door and step out of that dark room. Forgiveness comes in waves. Usually, it has to start with yourself. Once you allow that to happen, it ripples out to everything else. I watch waves lap against rocks, how they don’t ever stop. I think forgiveness works a bit like that.

When I first moved into my dorm, I hung a page from Mary Oliver’s House of Light on my wall. It read,

“Still, what I want in my life

is to be willing

to be dazzled—

to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even

to float a little

above this difficult world.

I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.

I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—

that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum

of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.”

So, you forget to look for light for a little while. The bravest thing you can do is to remember and start again.

I think when I say light, I’m really just using it as another word for home.

I love you Eugene, city of light in all the strange places.

I love you freshman year, for every lesson you taught me.

I love you spring, for thawing my heart.

Remember, you can always open that door.

Maya