Slanted Sunlight

For about a decade, I slept on my sister’s bedroom floor, because she was afraid of the dark and liked me to be close by when she woke up during the night. She never did outgrow this fear, but I eventually outgrew her bedroom floor, so now when she is afraid at night she uses a visualization technique where she closes her eyes and pictures this particular streetlight that stands next to my grandmother’s house. She says there has always been something about the way that light’s beam shines on the sidewalk that makes her feel safe.

I’ve never been afraid of the dark, but I do have similar visualization techniques that I use when I feel very anxious or upset. When I need to calm myself down, I close my eyes and revisit three specific memories while I repeat in my head: I am okay, I am okay, I am okay.

* * *

Memory one:

I’m lying on my mother’s bed listening to her old Leonard Cohen records. I’m tracing the flower patterns stitched into her quilt that is draped across her mattress, watching my fingertips move over the thin white threads illuminated by the morning sun streaming in through the window above me. The record revolves and crackles beneath the player’s needle as Leonard Cohen sings about Suzanne. I smell coffee brewing and I hear my mother opening cupboards in the kitchen.

I am okay.

Memory two:

I am sweeping fallen yellow leaves from the sidewalk in front of my grandmother’s downtown dress shop. It’s early morning and most of the town is still asleep. Sunlight pools in the rain gutters, filtering down through the faint autumn fog as I sweep the leaves and send them scattering from the curb. Up and down the street, other shopkeepers are out with their push-brooms clearing the sidewalks and I am listening to all of those countless bristles swishing across the cement in every direction at different paces. I turn around and look at the dress shop. My grandmother is fixing up her big front display windows, straightening the hem on a faceless mannequin’s skirt. She looks up from her work and smiles at me. She gives me a little wave and I give her a little wave back. Then she motions for me to keep sweeping, so I do.

I am okay.

Memory three:

It’s early in the morning and I am sitting at a wooden breakfast bar in a tiny California café with two of my friends. They drizzle syrup over their pancakes while I stir sugar into my coffee. We’re right next to the cook, watching her crack eggs into a pan and listening to them sizzle when they hit the heat.

All around us, dishes are clinking: forks against plates; knives against forks; glasses against tabletops; my spoon swirling against the sides of my coffee cup. Everyone talks low, as if to not disturb the quiet calm of the morning. I’m watching the cook’s hands grabbing eggs, metal bowls of pancake batter, spatulas, wooden spoons. She is in her own world, separated from me by a hedge of steam rising up from her griddle as she cooks breakfast. I listen to the murmur of the other customers as they talk to one another and I wonder about the conversations at each table. Some people are laughing together; some look sullen and are talking more to the their plates instead of each other; some say very little and are only half-heartedly awake, daydreaming as they stare out of the windows; some aren’t speaking at all and I try to guess what they are really saying with their silences.

To each person in the café, I assign a history. It’s my favorite people-watching game to play. My mother and I played this game all the time while I was growing up. We would pass a person on the street and try to piece together their life story by dissecting their every detail: the expression on their face, the kinds of things they carried in their hands, if they seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere important, or if they were walking slow and dreading every step they took. She would ask me, “How do you think that man got that scar on his knee? What’s the story behind that?” Or, “Why do you think that woman looks like she might cry? What do you think happened to her?” And we’d go on and on like this, trying to guess at the lives of strangers.

I think this is where I first developed empathy. I don’t know if my mother was intending to teach me empathy or if she was just passing the time, but she nonetheless taught me to see people in a different light, beyond their surface appearances, and to understand that every single person has a story, that we are all shaped by little individual moments of tragedy and triumph. To this day, I cannot pass by a person without wondering about where they have been and where they are going. Sometimes, when I am in a crowded place or walking on a busy sidewalk, the thought of so many stories floating around in such a small amount of space can make me dizzy. I think about how if I could listen to all of those histories at once, if I could know all the details of each existence, it would bring me to my knees; because life is that overwhelmingly sad, that overwhelmingly beautiful.

Playing my favorite people-watching game in the little café that morning, I slipped into a kind of trance like state. I stirred my coffee over and over until it grew cold, listening to the steady stream of indecipherable murmurs all around me as the sun spilled through the doorway and trickled across the aged hardwood floors.

I am okay.

* * *

I had never noticed before now that these memories are all linked by a common thread. In each memory, the sunlight is always slanted at a certain angle that creates a distinct golden tint, similar to the way old faded photographs seem to be frozen in a pale, perpetual twilight.

I don’t know what it is about this particular slant of sunlight that makes me feel better. But it does. And for a little while, I am okay.