WE THINK WE have seen everything. Until one midnight when the light comes into our bedroom and fills everything with a blaze of lightning and snow and cosmic latte. As the bedroom goes dark we say, “Did you see that?” at exactly the same time. All the things the light could have been—a hall bulb exploding, a plane landing, a UFO peeping, a neighbor teasing, a wire shorting, the moon eclipsing—are discussed and eliminated. We can imagine little else being the source of the light, and so we close our eyes and we sleep.
Four months later, the light shows up in our bedroom again. The room is saturated in brilliance for mere blinks of an eye. By then, sick of finding logic in cancer and identities and death, we grow tired of imagining reasons for the light too. We say, “Wow, that was something!” and “Must be a mystery.” We go around as if we aren’t the kind of people who have seen this light. We stop insisting it happened just like this.