TORCHES

When I was in school a little girl fell down a well and her story made every headline and newscast. Volunteers came from all around and they lit torches through the night. They came with experts and oxygen and offered kindness and prayers to her desperate family. At nearly the same time a neighbor of mine fixed a tray of Christmas cookies and asked me to take them to my family. Something lured me into a dark descent of my own that day. Sinking into a window well behind snowdrifts and shrubbery, I hid the sweets there for days. Eventually I finished eating all of them, driven to isolation, cold and shame caught in the spell of sugar and spice.

Somehow when I was not much older than little Jessica I slipped underground, not into a well, but into a pit I could not escape. And like her, every move I made in my frustration, my anger, and apparent isolation put me in more jeopardy. So, I learned to keep still and I got used to feeling low. All the while I raged inside at ineptness that buried me alive, not in an avalanche, but an inch at a time.

But that subverted rage did nothing but fortify the demons dwelling there. Time and again I swallowed the lies they fed me and I forgot what I knew from infancy:

• I forgot that moving is a birthright;
• I forgot that being stranded is an abomination;
• I forgot that there are people who come with torches no matter how dark it gets.