Parhelion

Darren Morris, September 8, 2023

We took a break, or we broke. I’m not totally sure which, but it’s taken some time to get the wings sewn on again, almost a year, and always a feather here and there and inching out onto the thinnest part of the branch. Yet, I admit, the passion was not there. And the loss of passion is much worse than just dealing with the emptiness. It is that feeling of abandonment. That we knew there was something more, but we lost it, or it lost us. Here is what I know. We are here. Now. And really, we never left, we just went away for a while.

What brought us back? If you are reading this, that is the answer. It was you all along. Writers. Readers. Creatives. We rejoin everyone who contributes foolishly to some weird idea that we have a right to seek our truth, to dive into the language, to make connections, to conjure images, and to take some particular meaning from it all, as if we were part of a larger, more important reality than we can make on our own.

I have been dealing for some time with the loss of my sight due to a disintegration of the cones and mostly the rods in my retinas. It is a progressive genetic deal and the darkness has closed in gradually over the past 12 years. Yet, it may even stave off entirely and plateau, leaving me with something, at least until my age destroys it naturally. I still have a little. It’s like holding a flashlight in a field at midnight.

I need to say this, to write it: There are times that I am frightened beyond anything abstract the darkness could represent. For the past couple of months, in a vision condition totally unrelated to my genetic issue, one eye retained fluid where the retina attaches. What I saw out of that eye was greatly diminished, warped, and appeared to coat everything in a thick petroleum jelly. I could not see the face of the one I loved the most, sitting directly opposite her in a well-lighted space. A kind of blister formed near the brain’s tentacled conduit which interprets the visual. On the scans it looked like the mountain of purgatory. When it first happened, when I awoke with it, what else could I think but that I was done seeing and done with my little piece of an independent life? So, when he told me this new thing would resolve on its own, I nearly kissed my doctor on his clinical head as if it were he who had saved the little part of my central vision that remains. Then I walked out of the appointment and directly into a column. But I felt great all the same.

The fear lifted instantly. And why should it have? Didn’t I still face impending blindness much too early in my life? Of course, but it wasn’t going to happen just then. And what was it anyway but just another change? Others live with it. I admire them. Yet I had become so dependent on the light. I thought it was the end. But like Dostoevsky facing the false firing squad, I was released back to my cell. What’s more, the eye was going to improve, and I hadn’t improved at all for a very long time.

People sometimes ask if my other senses are growing stronger and, quite honestly, they have not. If anything my hearing has gone elsewhere, muttering amid the ossicles. My discernment of notes within wine or cigars, never sharp before, are purely barbarian now, and my olfactory continues to slumber far beyond the subtleties of aroma. Now in my early fifties, other deteriorations have alighted. My agility has already become that of a drunken baby, and my knees are ancient, crumbling, marble statues of knees.

Still, I’ve come to realize that my blindness would just be another unknown, a change like all the rest but somehow unique to me. If everyone’s objective is to understand who they truly are, what a great thing that I am wrestling with this particular issue and with fear, that I persist in this death match, and that, most importantly, I am still loved by my wife and my hound, Clementine, and by my family and friends, who are terrific hominids. Everyone wrestles with their issues, and we lose to find ourselves again, even in darkness. It’s like a goddamned solar system in here. The one thing that will never leave us until it’s pointless to keep any longer is the imagination, an engine that operates even better when you close your eyes. What an amazing gift then to continue to find myself among them, and you, orbiting again, waning and waxing. How could I feel anything but gratitude?

In this issue, our first All-Poetry issue, we’ve kept our readers and contributors waiting too long. So here they are, teeming with brilliance: