Light. The sterile lighting of the hospital room on the day you are born. Flashing lights. From the hard plastic toy that never leaves your side as you learn to walk. A dim yellow glow. Appearing from the night light plugged into the corner of your room that chases off the looming figures in the dark. Formative years feel incandescent. It illuminates from every surface in small wisps that cling to the corners of our minds in blurs and blobs. They mesh together with fiction and reality, what others have told us, and the actuality of experiences. At what point does the light become overbearing and cause you to squint? Perhaps, it is when that light begins to dim as you are forced to outgrow each beam of radiance and morph into something a bit duller. To say the light goes out completely would be a lie, yet to say it would ever be lit the same would be too. While it remains obscured in the crevices of our prominent traits, there will never be a time akin to it in our existence again. Yet, we yearn and turn for a match to strike and light this flame once more. 

As a kid, watching adults felt like they escaped something. 

I think I expected adulthood to feel more like crossing a finish line. 

The magic of adulthood seemed like it would be so loud and obvious.

I’ll know freedom, who I am, and everything will all make sense. 

I didn’t question it, I just kept running towards what children imagine growing up is. 

But as that imagination gets to know reality, suddenly I’m 23 and the memory of the finish line isn’t as linear. Sometimes I miss every past version of myself at once. I feel like I must hurry because I owe them all something. I’m already grown, yet still growing up. I still feel like I’m chasing something, whether that be identity, understanding, or success. 

Adulthood feels like chasing the belonging to yourself, when you already do. Constantly choosing what kind of person you want to become, and slowly becoming them through tiny changes that no one applauds. Building a life out of small comforts that the 14-year-old in you planted.

The magic of this isn’t what I expected as a child, but I think the magic lies in the fact that the adult version of me is a blend of all that I wanted and want to be.

I’ve got rivers and streams in my fingerbeds.

The waters of old ways.

Seaports that smell like broken vases and burned-up doll hair. 

They still carry the same little boats from shore to shore. 

Sailors read the grain on old walls. They write mariner’s rhymes about the fading paint. 

I’m here by the bay window in my kitchen. It’s real dark outside. I’ve got the lights off in here anyhow. 

I say, If I’m to lose myself, I ought to be lost to the world too. No beacon for the rescue crew.

I rarely ever open the curtains. Too laborious. And I hate how the streetlamps glare in through the glass like thieves who want to get caught. But tonight, a big storm has come through and knocked the power out for the whole city, so I can sit here and look out and see absolutely nothing. I think I’ve been staring too long because out there now, past the lines of the panes, something seems to have changed. It’s the depth of the black, the value just above the treeline. Such a slight lift in tone. Says, Nothing ever fully bleeds into the night. Somehow it had come around behind me and brushed its hand over the back of my neck, pulling me gently. Just enough to make me aware of the glass again. And in it, I saw myself, and myself, and myself, and myself, and myself. All around, up and down the walls. A new old face in every pane. Then they blink, and they die, and I’m alone once more.

Strike Out,

Parker Defriese, Emma Chambers, and Dahya Goolsby