The light left me, but not the memory of its glow

Illness – or, more specifically, the threat of death – has a way of putting an edge one everything, of bringing bounty where before there was none.  It’s not a question of making lemonade out of lemons or anything like that.  It’s a question of having the film pulled back from your sticky eyes, the bandages removed, the blinders ripped off so you can take in the view, which is filled with light, light, light.  The kind of light you don’t want to linger in, because it has an ominous, heavenly quality.  The kind of light that illuminates even the most delicate details, so you can see everywhere the scratched and the marred.  There was a time when I thought that I might die, when death seemed imminent, and I moved through a world that was brilliantly lit with this light and beautiful in its flamboyant decay.  And then, when I learned I wasn’t about to die, the light left me, but not the memory of its glow.

– Lauren Slater, Bloodlines (The Sun, March 2015)