Writing into the Light

On porous barriers and finding new shapes for ourselves

A cricket is sitting on top of the crash cymbal, slightly resonating the metal with its wind-up legs. I am trying to write, but I can’t hear my own thoughts above the rattle.

I made a rookie mistake and left the light on in the studio all night. It’s all so new. I’m not yet used to the ritual of flicking the switch next to the door, closing and locking the windows.

When I entered this morning, there were bugs. Spiders and moths, black and beating their wings against the walls, and this pea-green cricket the size of a child’s fist. I am terrified of insects—I will shriek if an antenna so much as grazes me—but I have to give it up to them. They’ve only done what we all do: sought shelter, made their way in. They found the brightest light in the long dark, fought their bodies through the gaps and cracks to get there.

There’s an Ann Hood quote that I recently heard and held onto. “Write about the things that keep you up at night,” she says. In other words, you don’t have to go digging and searching for something to say. The most mundane or seemingly random itch you’re scratching—a dying houseplant, a misplaced notebook, an awkward interaction at your friend’s birthday party—probably contains the seeds of something much more profound. Write about the things you’re trying to forget but that find you, beating at the walls, in the middle of the night.

Dean Wesley Smith calls it writing into the dark, when you don’t know where you’re going when you’re telling a story, but you trust that you’ll find your way through the void. I often feel this way when I’m creating. Just groping along. But right now, as I watch the bugs fling themselves at the glass light fixtures above my head, I’m thinking, what about writing into the light?

Is this what Hood meant—that we must find our way through the wall, write our thoughts out of the nighttime and into the clear day? Watch them scuttle and blink into the light, taking on their own life.

At night, what’s keeping me up is this heat. Like a hand over the mouth. I used to imagine, when I was in a particularly rough patch of bad sleep, that Sleep was a ghost haunting the house. In my mind, I called Sleep to me and watched it float up the stairs, down the hall, over to my bedside, and finally up onto me. Sleep pressed its form into my body, covered my face with its face, my mouth with its mouth, until we were one. But now the house is heat-mapped—no place for ghosts. It is humidity that’s pinning me down while I lie awake, thrashing at the sheets.

I used to love this month. Summer was unquestionably my favorite season. But the heat—which is seeming less like a wave and more like the water we now swim in—is making me reconsider. My nickname once was “Lizard” for the way I always sought the sun, but now I’m spending so much of my days indoors. I cower in the coolness.

On a recent, too-rare walk down the road, I was surprised to see that the chicory was blooming in the ditches, showing off astral purple-blue flowers. A color so vivid, it holds its shape against the molten air, suggesting something solid in those paper-thin petals. I had missed its approach, had barely registered the changing of the guard of the wildflowers. Now curly dock, now knapweed. Now the frilly campions, members of the plant family simply, delightfully, called “pinks.” I have been sitting inside under a false sun while the tomato plant sprouted its first two flowers.

The heat is worrying on so many levels. There is the deep grief of recognizing that this just might be the way of things now—summers spent indoors. The campions and chicory forced into narrower seasons, the crickets all scrabbling madly for shelter. There’s the terror of understanding what my child will inherit, and how he may never know these beings at all. The helplessness of watching the thermometer rise.

But I see now that, for me, it’s also a symptom of a bigger identity shift. Lately, I have felt so estranged from myself. The things I loved, I no longer love. The things I love to do, I no longer do. What’s keeping me up at night is not just the heat but the fear of what it’s taking away, what it is vaporizing within me. How do I hold my shape against it?

It feels like an act of internal evaporation: the vanishing of liquid, the visible suddenly made invisible. I remember being obsessed with that Ben Folds song when I was in high school. I thought it was the saddest, most beautiful way to describe heartbreak: I poured my heart out. / It evaporated.

My instinct, then, is to create a barrier, to keep the juiciest parts of myself in. To seal up all the gaps and cracks. But then there would be no cricket making music in my studio. There would be no writing into the light, drawing those thoughts from out of the restless night and onto the bright page, bursting through dawn and dream with something to share. The porousness of these barriers—self, shelter, shadow and light—is what makes for the best art.

And so what if I let myself melt? To see that the self is changing all the time, and to surrender to it. To become a different shape, and to welcome it.

I looked for it, but I couldn’t find the cricket in the studio again. It simply vanished. It moved with the magic of water, now liquid, now steam, drawn up into the air to become something new entirely. I like knowing that here in the woods, where I write every dawn, I have made—am making—am made of—something more fluid than I ever imagined.

Last weekend, I went blueberry picking with some friends at high noon. We were alone in the fields, the sun bearing down like a yoke on our shoulders as we moved, slow as beasts, through the bushes. Many of the berries were still white and rock hard, but the ripest ones were a deep, squishable blue and popped right off the stem. These blueberries had a white sheen on them that you could rub off with your thumb—a natural barrier, I later learned, that protects the skin of the fruit from bugs and bacteria and keeps the moisture in so that the berry stays plump and juicy. The coating gave each berry a hazy look, like a little crystal ball.

We put on another slather of sunscreen, all of us turning ghostly and zinc-white, to protect our skin. But it was so hot, we left before we had even filled our baskets.

Back home, in the cool of the fan, I split the carton of blueberries with my son. We ate them one by one, the hazy residue vanishing under our tongues. The skin beneath was the most beautiful color—an astral purple-blue. I have never tasted a sweeter berry.