My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
That’s from Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote it in 1922 if you believe the internet. That was during the Roaring Twenties, America’s wild spring break party when everything was new: jazz and radio and planes. All the roaring stopped when the stock market fell and the Great Depression came.
Did Edna sense that the big party was coming to an end in less than a decade? Do people have that power, some at least, to sense the temporary nature of their reality? I don’t know, and honestly it’s not something I’ve ever thought about much. Until now.
There are lots of things I think about now that I never had to think about before. Like the fact that I sense candles going out and darkness ahead.
Hope tortures you. And suddenly, lately, I’ve had this pathetic hope that Armo actually liked me. And the thing is, he does. Shouldn’t that make me happy? But when you feed hope, it grows and demands more—like a child, I suppose. That he wasn’t repulsed by me, that he actually likes me just makes me wish he loved me. I know how pathetic and needy I must seem. How pathetic and needy I am. It’s just that growing up, I was loved, at least a little, and then, when I revealed who I am, that love stopped. Probably it would have been better if the whole “L” thing was unknown, something I had never experienced, then I wouldn’t miss it. I think a person blind from birth doesn’t miss color like a person who goes blind later.
I see the way Shade and Dekka both look at me. They think I don’t notice, but I do, and I know they see how pathetic—there’s that word again—I am. They want to warn me off. They want to say, “Cruz, don’t get yourself turned inside out over some guy.” I know because that’s what I would say to me, what I do say.
Everything is coming apart. What am I supposed to do, tell myself he’s not the only guy, there are lots of fish in the sea? But time is short for all of us. I can feel it. My candle is burning at both ends, but night is coming, and sooner not later, my little candle will be snuffed out.
I’m not strong like Dekka, or brilliant and strong like Shade and Malik. I don’t want to be some superhero. I want to go to college, or maybe have a nice job that I don’t hate. Some day I may want to adopt kids. And I want to do all those boring, safe things with a big, sweet, impossible-to-push-around white boy with a silly name.
Is that asking too much? Of course it is. Because the big, sweet white boy sometimes turns into a bear and I sometimes turn into Beyoncé, and the whole world is teetering on the edge of a cliff and even if we somehow survive, the world I know will never return.
Maybe that’s why that poem that I memorized in, like, fifth grade suddenly came back to me. Because it’s not just my own candle that will not last the night.