Voyage

The breath is golden and light. Silence is the space between six hands. Stars are there, present, blinking out communication. 
Hold still and wait, the messages come through our skin, into our eyes. They bypass the mind and seep in like water on a meadow.  Patience. It comes. More slowly than you’d like, but sit still, you’ll feel it tingling, moving like excited bees over open flower faces. 
Yes, we are sweet, just let the city melt as it needs to. Those lights and bulbs and glass are not needed. Let them melt into pools of reflection.
The bees will find us open and pungent, sticky sweet and seeping with desire. 
Sit still, you will feel it. Silence is the space between six hands. The stars are there, blinking. Night waits for us, holds us in its quiet hours. 
Let your skin listen, the space behind you knees, the shadows radiating with intensity. Wide are our hands, chests, tubes and ventricles. Tired, our bodies.  Sit still, let the body listen. The muscles, aching. Screaming for rest. 
Oh, the Blanket.  Mother in her folds.  Infancy folded and clean, smelling of newness and fluff. The eyes, so bright, peeking from behind lids that weigh down; gravity will not be outsmarted, though we try.
Dream, oh, the dream.  Shifting in its red and black.  The orange moving like wispy clouds.
Ours is the road. A spiral of tar and gravel. Wide avenues that sometimes break into trenches and dirt paths.
None are the same, as the labyrinth walls can attest. Travel is motion, our steps clatter in the cracks of time, bouncing in the silence between our hands.

Perfection On The Corner

Parker sipped at the jar that held her morning cup of tea.  Just 15 minutes after the water had boiled and the milk was added to the decaf earl gray, all the aromas and flavors were blended and it was now the perfect temperature.  She held the jar with her right gloved hand, finding the glass too hot for the touch, but just the right heat for her tongue. Steam danced in brief swirling movements off the top of the liquid, smelling of earthy bergamot and sweet cream. 
She guided the cool plastic steering wheel with her left, ungloved hand, turning it expertly as the road curved just slightly to the left, and then a moment later, to the right.  On her left was the Alemany farmer’s market, which she knew started very early. 
It was 7:30 and already there were groups of two or three middle aged Asian women crossing the street, leaving with heavy bags of produce and vegetables she could not name. She surveyed the sea of white canopied tents from afar as she waited for the light to change. When it did, she was off, scanning the road for potential hazards, as Mr. Dutton had taught her in driver’s ed. 
She went underneath a freeway overpass and was once again delighted to see the mural on the large cement pillar that held up part of the overpass bride.  It was bright, with all the rainbow represented.  The painting wrapped around the wide cylinder and there were huge purple and yellow flowers that guided the eye smoothly towards the predominant subject: the torso of a smiling black woman nearly enveloped in foliage and colors.
She hit another light as she emerged from the shadow of the bridge.  She sat, watching the various lanes of cars take turns moving through the intersection. A Beatles song came on the radio and she sang along with the lyrics. 
“Jai Guru Deva. Om... Nothing's gonna change my world.” 
She noticed the vacant lot on the corner edged with wild fennel over five feet tall.  Where some of a fence remained, scrawled graffiti speckled it like bird droppings on a rusted car. 
“Nothing's gonna change my world.” 
She sang, and it was one of those moments, so early in the morning, when everything seemed perfectly in place. All the thousands of moments that had filled her lifetime, the people she had known- those that had been forgotten and lost, the moments she remembered and the pain that had etched itself into her story, everything at that corner seemed so delicately perfect.
It was now a familiar sensation that seemed mostly to come on these early morning drives, sometimes with a warm jar of tea in her hand and a sense of something at the edge of her skin and awareness more beautiful than she could ever really describe, a wonder that went beyond the knowable.
“Jai Guru Deva. Om... Nothing's gonna change my world.” 
As a tear swelled up and pushed itself over the lip of her eyelid, she remembered that she had cried at the very same spot during a Beatles song just a few weeks before. The same song. The same moment repeated.  She let the tear flow, letting the tiny river stay on her cheek tingling with life. 
Breathe, she remembered.  Her chest expanded as the light changed to green and she pressed on the pedal.
Later she would think about the corner- what was it about that spot, so early in the morning, that brought her to life?  Later she would caress the edges of consciousness and marvel at the mystery of the recurring story.
But for now, before the human remembered itself, she sang and let the tears fall as they would. 

The Girl Who Could Not Be

There was a room with a small source of light coming in from a narrow window facing east. It was six in the evening but the sun was still shining out there strongly, as though it refused, just like my children, to go to bed. There was too much to see out there, and the plants needed the light too. Lydia liked those bright red geraniums blooming in her window box.
My mouth was open, I was laughing or breathing, moving in some way that left my mouth exposed and open. I felt something strange, a particular foreign pressure inside and I knew, I knew a bee had flew in.
It did not fly out. Even though there was no mirror and I couldn’t see it on my tongue, I knew it was there, laying still. I watched myself as though a spectator, aware of every muscular movement and thought. Though I watched from the position of an audience member, seeing and feeling in parallel realities.
I watched myself walk up to the man in light colored pants beside the window. He was holding a small plastic cup filled with dark red wine, the kind of cup used in gallery openings. He had a sweater draped around his shoulders. As I walked to him, I noticed he was talking to a man dressed just as he was, holding his cup in the same way. I walked towards them without hesitation and asked calmly, keeping my mouth open while doing so, to extract the bee.
The man, the first one I had noticed, did so easily, using his thumb and thin pointer finger to dip into the darkness of my mouth. He pulled out the bee and looked at it intently as he held it up to his face, letting it catch the light, though I could not tell if it was alive or dead.
As I turned from him, I wondered aloud how many bees fly in and out of my mouth without my realizing it. As I spoke, I pictured myself in bed in a dark room, only my face exposed while a pile of blankets swamp the rest of my body. I could see my open mouth, my wide mouth like an unguarded fortress. How many things go in and out? How many things fly from its space, those sentences dripping with unintended inflections and complaints? How many things go in and out when I’m not paying attention?
I wondered for a moment, realizing that there were too many to count, and then walked on, forgetting.

The next morning I walked into the sunshine, surprised by its strength. I held my car keys ready in one hand, the bright shiny silver of the key poised, alert, waiting for the perfect fit of the hole, just a moment until it could slip inside and be of use.
I let out a little excited wail as I felt something land on my naked shoulder. I turned to the source of the pressure, finding a bee perched beside me, fully intent on coming for the ride.
“Little bee!” I shouted mildly, “ahh!”
I pushed him off my shoulder with a gentle nudge of my finger, feeling something insect-like on my skin, a kind of cold, pokey sensation that was so small, so soft.
“Have you thought about the ‘word?’” my friend asked as we slid into the car and heard the click of the seatbelts from our trained hands. “Sometimes it’s all about the word, like, maybe you don’t want to ‘be.’”
I stared though the window, turning my wheel with practiced motion, seeing the blur of the neighborhood houses as we began to move.
I nodded, my mind racing. How many times was I afraid to shine? To dance, to sing until the heavens could find me with delight in my eyes? How many times was I afraid of my own absurdity, my thoughts and comments? How many times did I stifle my whims and hide in my room, saving the best parts of myself just for me?
Yes, I thought to myself, I am afraid to be. And yet I could not say it. I couldn't allow my mouth to open and let the words come flying out.

Walking In The Woods

I clear my mind before entering. My chest fills to the breaking point with air, my belly extends. In and out. In and out. The car is the known space, and I sit still for a little while, looking into the world of green. Time to move.

My right foot hits the earth, then the heel of the left. On and on I move, my feet in rhythm, my arms following. My breath moving. I reach up to push some hair out of my eyes with my right hand, I look over to my right. There are some red silk flowers on the lawn. Close by are other faded objects of sadness, left for one who might never see. Everything is cultivated and sculpted, “control” is the word that comes to mind. Beyond the small fence is all chaotic earth and woods. Completely wild, exploding in sex and death and birth and decomposition.
My feet take me through the boundary between the known and the wild. I enter another kingdom and I am home. Only it is different. And I am different. And I have never left. And I have changed, and it has changed and we are both the same.
Here, the rational is buried. Here, the birds know how to build nests and crickets don’t have to be taught what to eat. The mind is not needed. Language does not bend the branches to its will, it all moves, no good or evil, no sentimentality. Here, we move as we must and here, I shed my skin.

It has all changed so dramatically. The river is smaller, the weeds that line the muddy bank are taller. I walk through the same woods, yet different woods, new trees, new birds, new water and leaves. It is the same place, on the same patch of earth, but it is all new, just as every moment we burst and are born again. There are new creatures that scamper and fly and burrow. A new body that has brought me here and takes me through the thicket of green and brown.

I want to follow the creek.

I hear birds up in the leaves like hidden wind chimes. Calming the air are crickets or cicadas. Their intuitive noise slows me down even more. My right foot takes a step forward, my left foot rises and hits the earth. My right hand scratches my thigh.

I walk a little deeper. Just the woods in all directions. Life without language, life without a structure of concrete morals or rationality. In these wooden arms, in this body of green and brown and sex and life and death, everything is new and everything is old. Everything is here, present and eternal. Here, beyond the edge.

Waiting at the Light

I see the stoplight fifty feet ahead of me change from yellow to red. I press on the brakes and pull up to the white crosswalk at a crawl. On the other side of the street is the pole of the steel stoplight, holding out its blaring red circle like a still wizard. He commands my patience. My muscles tense as I sit. It’s just a few minutes past nine and the morning air is full of cold mist and whisper-light gusts of fog. The sky high above is a force of thick gray and white. My body shrinks slightly. There is annoyance, there is the deadness of wasted time. The forced motionless wait. I look ahead, at the street beyond this intersection. There is a silver car on the right side of the road, double parked next to the long line of cars standing still next to the sidewalk.
And then, something ruffles my attention. Something faster and more subtle than consciousness or thought. A force quicker than lightning, a movement so fast as to be close to indescribable. I look again at the double parked car, at the yellow blinking headlights.
The street is lined with one-story box-like houses, packed so tight and neatly that they touch walls. Yellow touches white, white touches beige, beige clings to blue. The yellow lights keep blinking. The street ahead rises at a slight angle for five hundred feet and then at a stop sign in the distance, drops abruptly out of sight.
Ten houses past the blinking car… I watch a man walk down the front stoop of his box house. His head is slightly lowered, watching his feet and the stairs. The distance between us has turned all his colors black. His skin, clothes, hair, all his features, he is one movement of blackened limbs. He walks across the street and disappears from sight. A moment later, a man begins to walk out his front door and down the stoop. Didn’t I just see this? Is it the same man, did I watch the future from this vibrating car? Is it his brother, following him out the door? How many people live in each of these houses?
Warm walls that protect against the cold of this air. They seem extra important on a day like this.
A red car starts to my left and moves to the right side of my vision. It zooms past, unhindered by a red light. I stare ahead. The yellow headlights are blinking, there is no one in the street, the houses sit quietly in the fog. From the world beyond the stop sign, a white car ascends the hill and approaches, passing the car with the hazard lights.
Two cars cross the field of my vision, one red, one black, they cross parallel paths in the asphalt square of the intersection. In my peripheral vision, I see two cars coming to join me at the light of patience. They settle into stillness on my right and my left. I do not turn my head, but I am completely conscious of their arrival. I feel the strength of their idle mechanical parts, the humming of their churning engines.
I see myself from the outside… the girl dazing off…she does not even blink. What thoughts dance in her mind?
But no, I am aware of them all. Conscious of every movement that has passed my body. Every car, every sound.
I am really here, only here.
My own past is non-existent, my future is a blur of white, even my immediate destination is far beyond any thought.
The car beyond the stoplight keeps blinking. I am with them all at this moment. Completely immersed.

The Artist

She knelt among the rocks, on the uneven ground that led up to the main road. She was on a corner, where the busy main street crossed over the park road on a flat wide bridge with arches of brick and rusty lamps hanging from its underside. From where she knelt, she could look over the road to the treetops on the other side, she could look at the trees that were right next to her, covering the edge of the road with shadows and green, she could look at the people passing under the bridge, in bikes and cars and on foot, sometimes looking up at the cars whistling by or at her, but mostly looking straight ahead while talking or listening to music on headphones.
She spread a wide fragile piece of thin paper over a rock and traced the edge with a soft pencil. Then she looked up again. The sky was bright blue above her, and it covered the day in softness and hope. Her own hands were a bit scarred from the hard work of many years but they felt soft and young on a day like this, when the wind blew through the branches just enough to make them sing and the sunlight came down upon her like a gift that never ends. She made another trace with the pencil and looked up again. The cars on the main street had stopped momentarily and she could hear the thumping of a loud bass coming from a long red Chevrolet. She made another gesture with the pencil, trying to capture the sound in a quick movement of her wrist. There was laughter coming from another car and the sound of loud children screaming coming from another. She looked up again and then the cars moved, and there was a blurry parade of faces in profile, of metallic colors and spinning wheels, all drenched over the placid and static figure of the bridge that stood solid and heavy underneath it all. She looked down at the park road where a young girl in a bicycle was riding by. There was another quick gesture of her wrist and a very light marking on the paper that she held and then the girl in the bicycle was gone.
She stood up momentarily, looking over at the couple just around the trees. The dark haired woman was on her back and the serious looking man was above her, looking deeply into her eyes. She knelt again and made another quick gesture on the paper. A strong wind came by just then and the large paper wiggled and waved in her hands. She held it tight and looked at the couple again. The man was slipping away and the woman was looking up at him with a trace of anxiety. One more flick of the wrist and something remained, a quick reflection of that which was already gone. A bird perched on a branch several feet above her. She looked up and the quick staccato sound of its melody came to her through the brown web of the branches. Again she looked down at the paper and made a quick gesture, leaving traces of melody and wing and beak and tiny bubbles that were eyes on the yellowish paper that she held in her hands.
She looked further down the road, towards the west, where the road curved away by the side of a wall of jagged brown rocks. A little stream ran next to the sidewalk there and she saw two women walking slowly by the water, smiling and trading words and phrases like bits of soft bright sand. She looked down at her paper, which was now getting crowded, and she made a few more gestures, trying to catch the slow movement of their steps, the ease of their voices, the watery music of the stream next to them. She looked a bit to her left and there were two men riding up in slim sport bikes. She made very quick gestures on the paper that would capture the silver of the light upon the wheels, the lightning icon on their helmets, the strong solid eyes that looked further down the road.
She took a deep breath and surveyed her work, a scattering of quick curves and marks over a large yellowish paper that still rustled in the wind, eager to fly away. She nodded and started to roll it up into a smooth even tube. The meaning was unspoken, the representation was obscure, the transmission was complete.

The Family Picnic

There was a wide open lawn just south of the park’s northern boundary, where the sounds and the shadows of cars flew across the leaves of the bushes like ghosts and a statue was perched on top of a thick heavy brown rock, looking down at the grass with eyes of arrogance. There was a small circle of thick trees to the eastern side and a dark grove to the west. The park road passed by the edge of the lawn but it was higher up so the sounds of motors and honks got mostly lost in the wind. The grass was moist and uneven and there were no gaps of dirt in the whole green expanse. The place gave the illusion of isolation even as it stood right in the middle of restless city activity, desires that plunged through the street like ravens, dreams that fell from the sky like shooting stars. Here everything had the silence of undistinguished noises, here was the promise of eternity in a glimpse of shadows and a green shade of light.
On this particular sunny afternoon, a family of four had taken over the center of the lawn. They were an older couple, their son and their daughter in law. The father was a strong thick man with angry eyes and muscular arms covered in tattoos. He had full black hair and a bushy moustache that trailed over his fat lips. He wore a white T-shirt and rumpled blue jeans. He sat on the edge of the sheet that his wife had brought for them, and he constantly surveyed his surroundings for any sign of danger or intrusion. The mother was a full figured woman who looked older than her husband. Her hair was turning white and her round belly protruded over her waist like a basketball. Her face was lined by wrinkles, both etched in the flesh of her cheeks by the ongoing passage of the years and also newly pressed by constant worry. She wore light brown pants that came down to her knees and a leopard print faded shirt, a gesture to memory, a sign of better days. She stood by the food and looked over her small reign of three people, trying to make sure that things went as planned, knowing that everything could be derailed at a moment’s notice.
The son sat on the cooler as if to claim as his own private property. He had short black hair and a thinner body than his parents. His arms were muscular but not as thick as his father’s and he showed no signs of tattoos. He was hunched over in an easy expression of relaxed amusement, mostly looking at his wife who sat on the sheet directly in front of him. She was the only one of the four whose skin wasn’t white, instead she was the color of coffee mixed with milk. She wore a manta shirt with colorful adornments around the neckline. Her hair was solid black and it was straight and smooth as it fell gracefully over her shoulders. Her eyes were thin and slightly slanted, her breasts were small and pronounced. She sat sideways, resting most of the weight of her body on her left arm. This sideways position gave her a look of royalty, as if a queen had decided to spend a day among the peasants.
"It’s a beautiful day isn’t it?" the mother said with a touch of anxiety, an unsuccessful attempt to gracefully interrupt the cloud of silence that tended to descend on them like a black cloud.
"It sure is… we don’t have many of these around here…" the son said and nodded to his wife, urging her to make a comment.
She looked up at him and subtly shook her head, in an attempt to refuse her husband’s demand, but then she talked anyway. "It’s very nice to be out on a day like this… isn’t it?" and with the question at the end she turned to the father whose eyes were locked on the road above them. At the moment he was so focused on the small group of teenagers that were walking by that he missed the gesture of his daughter in law. The mother stepped in to accommodate for her husband.
"It really is good to be out on a day like this… right?" and she stepped across her husband’s vision. The father looked up at her and then turned to look at the two younger people.
"Yes, it is. It is a nice day." And he nodded gruffly, as if it pained him to admit that anything at all could have a touch of niceness.
"You two should come up here more often," the son said, looking at his parents but feeling the burning eyes of his wife on him. "We could spend more days together… more days like this…"
The mother nodded aggressively. "Yes, that would be very nice… family should be together… right?"
The father looked up at her and then at his son. "That would be good… I probably can’t you know…work and all… but it would be good if I could…" His head swiveled slightly and his eyes landed on his daughter in law. She looked back at him and attempted a smile.
"Family should definitely be together… " and he looked up at the road once again, as two men in bikes rode by. The daughter in law looked up at her husband and nodded. The husband looked down at her and pressed his eyes together and shrugged his shoulders, then he turned to his mother again.
"Whenever you can make it up here… it would be good to spend more time like this…"
"Yes it would… it really would…" the mother said as she felt another wave of silence descending on them with a dense heaviness that she wasn’t sure to be able to withstand and lift away.
"Shall we eat?" she said, smiling painfully.
"Yes, let’s eat…" the son said, and stood up from the cooler where he sat. The father nodded. The daughter in law looked away. The mother started to prepare the plates.
The statue looked down at them and the lawn continued in its endless silence, untouched by the cars to the north or the south, untouched by the sound of airplanes flying overhead, untouched by the strange singing sounds of the people sitting on its heart. The statue had seen many just like them. The lawn would hold many more again.

The Couple Holding Hands

The woman walked out of the museum first, with a steady movement that clearly embodied confidence. She had black hair, long enough to barely touch her shoulders and fall in soft curves around her cheeks. She was wearing small glasses and her face was hard, as if the skin had ossified into permanent features that now would hardly move at all. She wore a long white shirt and blue jeans. She walked with the decisive manner of a soldier and her mouth was pressed together into the promise of a frown. She turned around to look at her boyfriend as he crossed the glass doorway and stepped out into the sunlit sidewalk. He was taller than her, thin and wiry. His hair was also black but cut much shorter. His eyes had a sense of calm that bordered on sleepiness. He wore a long brown T-shirt and blue jeans like hers. He walked toward the woman nodding, as if to say without words: ‘Now, that’s done.’ After him came her friend, a younger woman in a flowery dress and medium heels. She held a camera in her hand and she walked towards them with an enthusiastic grin drawn from cheek to cheek. The three of them came together at the top of the stairs and then walked down the gray cement steps. The boyfriend looked over towards the wide open plaza, covered in thin little trees and the sound of kids playing and birds singing. The woman looked straight towards the sidewalk instead, ready to move on. The friend smiled some more and looked towards a dark sculpture that stood in the middle of the lawn that surrounded the museum.
"Look at that… what is that?"
The sculpture had the shape of a black inverted funnel. The surface was shiny and polished, making a deep contrast with the grass and the gray sidewalk around it. The inverted funnel was covered with little angels, cherubim, who climbed up the slippery surface and over each other, trying to reach the top. Each of the angels was different and each made its effort in a particular and distinct way. Some were falling backwards, some were almost reaching their goal. The friend walked ahead of the couple and examined the sculpture carefully, even running her fingers over the angelic bodies, trying to feel their struggle through her hands.
"Look… they’re angels… they’re climbing and climbing…"
The man nodded and the woman looked at her friend and at her boyfriend with a sense of growing impatience.
"Well… we should be going back and…" she said, trying to sound as if it meant nothing, as if anything that happened would be fine with her, but she was unable to betray a bit of annoyance, a touch of cold impatience at the edges of her words.
"Just a second… I want to take a picture of the two of you… right here… in front of the sculpture."
The woman looked at her boyfriend, looking to see how he would react. He shrugged his shoulders and his eyes looked more sleepy than ever. Then, in a voice that was barely loud enough to be heard, he said:
"Sure… why not?"
The friend, lifting the camera to her eyes, looked at the woman and nodded towards the large black funnel that rose up from the green grass. "Well?"
The woman shrugged her shoulders like her boyfriend had and said: "I guess it’s ok…let’s just do it quickly."
The two of them walked towards the sculpture, which rose to three times their height. They stood in front of it, about a feet apart, waiting for the friend to take the picture. The friend made a gesture with her free hand and said:
"Closer you guys! You have to get closer!"
She stepped back slightly, trying to make sure she got them both into the picture as well as the dark shiny figure that rose behind them. The woman stepped closer to her boyfriend and he stepped a bit closer to her, without looking at each other. Their shoulders bumped together awkwardly and they both looked towards the friend, who was still getting ready to take the photo.
"Well? Go ahead and take it!" the woman said, feeling her boyfriend’s shoulder against her own.
"Just a second…" the friend said, and she stepped a bit farther back. "I think I got it… but you guys need to smile more… why don’t you hold hands?"The boyfriend sighed lightly and the woman couldn’t stop a burst of nervous laughter.
"Just take the picture!" She looked sideways at her boyfriend whose eyes were squinting against the sun.
"I want you to hold hands. It will look much better that way!"
Again a burst of nervous laughter came from the woman’s lips. She turned towards her boyfriend who was still just squinting into the sun and she grabbed his hand in hers and pulled both their hands, now pressed together, in front of them.
"There! You happy?" her voice dripping with a forced nonchalance.
The friend shook her head. "No, it doesn’t look right. You both still seem very awkward…. Like something’s wrong. It will come through clearly in the picture."
The woman tried to press closer to the boyfriend, feeling the tight muscles of his left arm against her shoulder. She rearranged the hands again and she smiled towards the camera. The boyfriend just stared ahead.
"You have to smile too!", the friend said to the boyfriend.
"C’mon! Just take the picture!" the woman said, feeling that there truly was something wrong but completely unsure of how to fix it.
The boyfriend turned to her then, looking steadily into her eyes. His pupils opened up slightly and he pulled on her hand and turned it over, so that his own hand was secure on top of hers. Then he pulled her closer to him and turned towards the camera with a smile. The woman smiled then, but it was not for the picture. The smile rose from her like mist from a clear lagoon in the middle of summer. It spread across her face like a transparent cloud barely touched by blue and pink, and her face became softer, and her cheeks became red and her eyes became brighter. Her body suddenly seemed to acquire curves it didn’t have before. She could feel her right hip barely touching the edge of his thigh and the sensation sent shivers all over her now relaxed body.
"There!" the friend said, and the camera clicked a couple of times. "That was good!"
The friend put the camera away. The boyfriend released the woman’s hands and the woman stepped away from the touch of his upper thigh and his wiry forearm. He started towards the sidewalk and the friend followed. The woman looked up at the shiny surface of the inverted funnel and at the angels that still struggled to climb to the peak. For a moment she admired their effort and she wondered at the nature of their plight. She wondered if it was love that propelled them forward and she wondered at the power of such love, love that could last a lifetime, love that could last beyond. For each of these angels, she thought, there must be many down in the darkness, unable even to start. She felt sympathy then for the lost ones, the ones that would always live in the shadows, the ones that would never make it up through the ground. When she turned back to the sidewalk, the friend and the boyfriend were already a hundred feet ahead. She rushed to catch up with them. In the distance, a violin was playing a strange sad melody. A car passed by and a group of teenagers were laughing loudly inside.
The friend turned around to see if the woman was coming. The friend smiled brightly when she saw the woman walking towards her, but the woman’s smile was gone again, along with the softness of her body and the brightness of her cheeks. The sunlight was too bright just then and the woman had to look down, away from her smiling friend, away from the shadow of her boyfriend, away from the bright light that would make her cry.