It's All Sunshine, It's Nothing But Sunshine

When I was a kid I liked to stare into the sun. Or, in its absence, light bulbs.

It was a game for my friends and I, like an ocular version of chicken. On clear blue summer days, or hunkered down in dark bedrooms. Coaxing the pupils to maintain their resolve, relax focus past the obvious. Straining to pick out the ghost of filament, the burning buried at the center, until blinking back tears we’d rub our closed eyes. The impression of all that light crackling against the sudden black of the interior.

Thankfully, I outgrew this habit, probably around the same time I started wearing glasses to correct my myopia. But there's still something about direct sunlight. Eyes closed, chin tipped skyward so sun’s gaze bores full into me like maybe the game could be reversed, like maybe that great big eye is relaxing focus past the obvious and searching for the ghost of filament inside me.

Today I'm thinking about combustion. Thinking about light, thinking about the things that sustain us and keep us alive. I am a body that requires food and water and sleep. I am a skin-draped sentimental spirit that thrives on sunshine and good conversation. I am a throbbing, four-chambered word machine pumping poetry.

When I think about you I think “sun” and “fierce” and “teeth”. I think “ocean” and “closer” and “hold me”.

Today I walk across campus to the transit center, and settle my body on a slip of warm concrete. Turn my eyes, closed, to the sun. Turn them open to the coming and going and there must be something to this, something obvious I can't quite wrap my thoughts around.

When I relax the focus, here is what I know: heat and skin, and the persistent thrum just below the surface of a beast consumed with its own burning.