Vanitas

There are scenes that make me indescribably lonely and always have.

The fluorescent buzzing of the light over the kitchen sink - whichever sink, wherever I am - reminds me of my grandmother’s house. A place so full of unconditional love and more familiar than my own home. I wonder, why then, the loneliness?

Tree shadows cast by golden-orange security lights pull me into that loneliness, too. Based on the same memories of the same place, my grandmother’s.

The nights that I tried to sleep on piled up comforters on the floor of my grandfather’s study, the security light cast ominous shadows of the pecan tree onto the wall. I must’ve stared for hours, not out of fear but out of an agitated sense of new, uncomfortable knowledge.

I was 11, and I was already well acquainted with my own mortality. That’s what happens when your little brother has leukemia. Your own mortality is what you contemplate as you stare at the pecan tree shadows on the powder blue wall.

The loneliness is bone-deep. But it has become a useful loneliness. One that quietly reminds me that this world shrivels into itself, bloats, and decays. I don’t mind this loneliness anymore. That loneliness leads me to gratitude when the world is plump and full of laughter and life. Like it is today.