“Light in the Darkness” Acrylic on Canvas, Deborah Stephan
Solnit, Rebecca. Recollections of My Nonexistence. penguinrandomhouse.com, 2021.
471 words
“In those days, I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were often at odds with each other.” (Solnit, 3)
“To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or flee it or the knowledge of it, . . . I was often unaware of what and why I was resisting, and so my defiance was murky, incoherent, erratic . . . (4)
“When I was about eleven there was a shoe store where my mother got me the engineer boots I favored back when I was trying not to be that despised thing, a girl . . . “ (6)
“The names of the colors are sometimes cages containing what doesn’t belong there. (8)
“Sometimes a gift is given and neither giver nor recipient knows what its true dimensions are, and what it appears . . . when I was young, ignorant, poor, and almost friendless, I went to look at an apartment for rent . . . ” (9)
He was a big black man of sixty, tall, stout, strong . . . overalls . . . When he handed me the rental application my heart fell . . . already been turned down by slumlord management company whose name was at the top of the form . . . I didn’t make enough money . . . told me if I got an older woman to apply, he wouldn’t tell them of my deception . . . asked my mother . . .” (11)
“I changed too; the person who moved out in the twenty-fist century was not that person who’d arrived all those years before . . . not like me at all in crucial ways, but me anyway, an awkward misfit, a daydreamer, a restless wanderer. (13)
“You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail . . . Sometimes birds return to their cages when the door opens . . . abandon that power . . . freedom from agency. . . but I loved my independence and privacy and agency and even some of my deep solitude, and there was never a chance that I was going to give them up.“ (15)
“In that little apartment I found a home in which to metamorphose, a place to stay while I changed and made a place in the world beyond. I accrued skills and knowledge and eventually friends and a sense of belonging.” (16)
“Possibility means that you might be many things that you are not yet, and it is intoxicating when it’s not terrifying . . . in that luminous home that Mr. Young made possible for me.” (17)
ShellseekerReflections 