The sunbeam -

Phoebe Barr 

It’s like keeping a fire going in the rain. It’s blowing carefully, slowly, on the tiny embers you’ve got, on the shred of dark orange heat still left. On dust, really - on graphite lines you scratched on the back of notebook paper, fingers trembling, cuticles bitten and skin raw, on dust you arranged so careful and slow into an ephemeral image you can now just barely see. It’s like trying to push all your need into this infinitely fragile collection of paper scratches. 

When I was a child I ran away in the woods while we were camping. I was chasing a sunbeam that I thought was running away from me. Winking in and out of sight, hopping from tree to tree, between little patches of ground. Light green through the foliage. It was always ahead of me, that one perfect round sunbeam with the perfect glowing dust flecks floating through it. I looked at it and I wanted to weep, and wanted to explode, and wanted desperately to have a light like that - I looked at it and thought, if I can get my hands around that, if I can get it down my throat, if I can feel it inside me then I’ll be happy forever. I’ll be satisfied. I chased it panting and shouting and running through the stitch in my side, for what felt like hours. 

My fingers never touched it. My parents found me and took me back to the campsite and I screamed and cried and tried to run, but the sun went down and the stars wouldn’t form that beam and I didn’t ever find it again. Dreamed about it but didn’t ever reach it. 

Then later, years later, when darkness felt close to overwhelming me, when the shadows crowded and closed over my eyes and bored into my thoughts and wailed into my ears until they’d pulled all that folded matter in my brain apart like putty, I’d run for that sunbeam again. Go outside where the winter wind bit and stretch out my hands to the sky and plead plead plead, I need that sunbeam. I just need to get it down my throat and then I’ll be happy forever. I just need to soak it into my eyes and then at last I’ll be fine. 

The sunbeam didn’t come. And it didn’t come, and it didn’t come, until eventually I had to learn to start making copies. 

Like cramming an ocean into a thimble and crossing my fingers it’ll stay inside by the power of cohesion. Whispering reality into an ugly, messy drawing on a post-it note or the back of a bag of chips, hastily scrawled in the moments I feel like I’ll die without it. Tearing open my chest, every single time, and letting my heart trace the preliminary lines, though it hardly remembers anymore what that sunbeam really looked like. Then stitching myself back together and blowing oh so painfully painstakingly tooth-grindingly desperately gently into those graphite lines and hoping for a tiny flicker, a reminder, a pale weak imitation just real enough to gulp down with my starving tongue. 

It’s like keeping a fire going in the rain. But I haven’t given up yet. Because sometimes I’m out by myself in the forest again, touching the old gnarled oak trunks and listening to birdsong, and the sunbeam comes bursting down through the trees a few feet ahead. Just whenever I least expect it. And it’ll stay there for minutes on end as I stand back, admiring it, not quite close enough to touch it but close enough to see those dust flecks that dance in its glow. And I’m still holding out for the day it’ll find its way down from the sky and hit my head on its tumble down, and beam into my eyes, and fill me. I still believe that’s possible. 

And in the meantime, yes, I’ve learned to scratch out my copies, but I’ve also learned those copies can be given away. That there are a thousand other people looking for sunbeams too, and my imitations, weak as they are, might be able to keep a few others moving. And I’ve learned that on days my fingers are too weak and my lungs too tired, that there’s no shame in tapping someone on the shoulder and asking if today they can draw a little sunbeam for me. 

And I stay alive. The embers, however they shrink, stay orange. The sun, however clouds obscure it, is always there.