My Sunshine

I open the page and catch my breath. Tears well up from the corners, edging close to my cheeks. The paper is so white. It’s so smooth. I breathe deeply and let the tears sit where they are. I place my palms flat on the surface of the paper. It’s smooth like the cheek of my son, firm like the back of my lover. The softness draws me in and keeps me still. Only my hands are moving— up, down, across to the edges. I let my hands linger. How can something so simple create such pure, sensational joy?

When I finally lift the page, I once again catch my breath. Between my forefinger and thumb, there is substance, weight, heft. I know in this moment that this paper is capable of catching my deepest fears and giving flight to my wildest whims. This is paper which will catch me. Perhaps this is paper that will help me remember that words are worth it. That this sadness gathering itself in my heart is welcome and that I’m allowed to listen.

I say a prayer to myself. May you allow yourself to listen today, Shey. Listen to the crackling leaves above you and the twittering creek beyond. Above all, may you listen to you. May the tears course down your cheeks and may you smile up at the cool tracks they leave. May you embrace the constrictions in your heart with your whole being. May the love you have and feel for yourself be known in the welcoming of your weakness. May this day, which started in despair become a gift in which you allow yourself to watch, to listen, to simply notice the beauty and complexity of all that is inside of you. Be lifted by the chill breeze that shudders the tender and aging leaves. Be awed by the way everything is moving and everything is still. Watch the sunlight cascade in strips through the layers and layers of green. Be humbled by the courage of others.

Writing this prayer becomes an act of bringing it to life. The smooth, heavy paper catches me and transforms my sensations of sadness into pure pleasure in being alive. I look up, breathing and noticing.

There is a girl across the sunlit field. She’s is curved around the body of her guitar. I cannot see her fingers, but slowly her notes float back across the meadow to me. I hear the pause to place her finger below the fret and the careful selecting and plucking of the strings. I witness the intensity of her practice. Painstaking note by note, I hear the melody: You Are My Sunshine.

Suddenly, I’m transported to a memory. We are in our old home, the red house on the hill above the university. I’m kneeling on the tiled bathroom floor singing to you, Zeba, as my hands curve and scratch around your curly head. You’re small, probably three, and I’m giving you a bath in the claw-foot tub. Your ears are under water as you ask me loudly to keep singing. Through the water, my voice must sound a hundred miles away, but you hear me and you ask for more. I sing You Are My Sunshine over and over again, first in English, then Spanish, then French. My hands are curved around the base of your head, scratching and holding close the curls as I rinse away the last of the shampoo. Over and over, I hold your head, smile down at your dark eyes, sing the words in all the languages I know.

The girl in the field has put down her guitar and picked up a harmonica. She leans back into the dappled light and hear her breathe her whole self into that small instrument. I lean back into my own little world, imagining the way I lifted you out of that bath, held your wet little body against mine, and never stopped singing.

You’ll never know, dear,

how much I love you.

Please don’t take my sunshine away.