The Light / by M. Dionne Ward

The light doesn't exist because of darkness. Maybe that's it. It's possible the light is just around. Just there because it is good. Existing for its sake alone. Darkness is REALLY just the absence of light, not the opposite of it.

Maybe that's what writing is for me...for my mind's sake, it exists if only for me to make sense of the senseless. To persist with a blind man's stick, inching about tap, tap, tapping the fuck away so as not to be lost. And for it to be absent, presents an emptiness that is frustrating and evil and heart-aching above all else.

It solves problems. Keeps the program running like it should. Tap, fucking tap. Grants meaning. Tap, tap, tap.

There would be a hole that couldn't be filled, I suppose. God likes to make jokes, and I think the big "Marcelle joke" is that writing will be something I yearn for, for all my years but I'll never find success with it.

Still, the light, though. There's nothing like reading the words aloud and hearing the power slide off each syllable like oil from a piston. It's magnetic and intoxicating and exhilarating. It's everything to me like basketball was everything to Jordan, I guess. 

That me, however, cannot be defined by anything like writing. As a human, I'm much too complex. Complexity aside, I accept it as my personal superpower. I just have to learn how to use it effectively. I'm like that Smallville Superman: the most powerful being on the planet and it took him 10 damn seasons to finally fly.