Borrowed Back

A friend of mine told me about a kiosk on a pier on a river in Paris where you can borrow moonlight. I would love to visit that pier, but it’s nearly as far away from me as the moon herself.

So I took a stroll by the river near my house, in the light of the waning moon, and there, on the fishing deck, like an apparition from the 18th century, the fog weaver was at her task.

I knew this had to be the place, could almost taste the place where the fissure in the thin veil began. I stepped through and inquired about the rules for borrowing light.

She squinted at me and shook her head and swept all of the jars on the shelf into a silk bag. “Not for you,” she muttered as she disappeared behind the shelves. She returned with an orb instead of a jar, still shaking her head.

I asked if there was a problem, and she said only if I couldn’t learn. I told her that my friend in Paris had been granted the opportunity to choose a jar to take home, and the look in her smoky eyes stated the obvious: I was not my friend, nor were we in Paris. I knew better than to mention tariffs.

I asked why I could not choose, and she sighed a riverbank of exhaustion and exasperation before telling me that I could not choose because I had been chosen.

I wanted to ask who had chosen me and what could be done about it, but I didn’t have to. Her eyes and elbows told me that the moon herself had chosen me and the rules were different in my case.

She said that people like me weren’t allowed to take jars because we would open them on the way home and give away the light to every wretched soul encountered, arriving home with an empty jar and no means of retrieving the light we had squandered, that the darkness would absorb it, and it would simply be gone.

I asked how I should go about carrying the orb, and as if speaking to a child, she said, “You must carry it inside you, always.”

When I replied that it wouldn’t fit, she took my hand and led me to the water's edge, silently instructing me to unload all of the garbage wasting space in my heart, to toss it in the river. Only then, she said, can your light have the air it needs to shine and burn inside you. The only need of light, she said is to cleanse the dark away, and once you’ve cast the demons aside, slit out the lies, the hurt, the grief, and worst of all the shame. Only then can the light within come back to life and sustain.