Northern_Lights_2014

She felt her mouth dry up. “Did something happen?” She didn’t answer. It was a funny thing, blindness. She couldn’t see but sometimes she swore the darkness got stronger. “You’ve been acting really funny lately, Luce.” The wind gained velocity, accompanied by a symphony of wails that beleaguered Luce’s hair and whipped it like daggers at her face. “Do you ever wish you could just . . . freeze an emotion? Freeze it, lock it in place, and never let it go?” She released his hand and buried it in her lap, clenching her hand into a fist. Harper issued no reply. She wondered what kind of expression he was wearing, what the shape of his eyes felt like, if they sounded sad or perplexed. Perhaps he was angry with her. Perhaps he sensed what was coming. Perhaps he had even been waiting for it. “You’ve told me, time and time again, not to listen to the doubts in my head. I—I don’t want to listen to them, I really don’t . . . but lately things feel odd, Harper, and I’m scared.” She waited for his usual instant reassurance, but there was none. Only the sorrowful mourning of the wind. “Every sour thought that creeps around in your brain is a monster, and it has a weakness: you can defeat it with music! ” is what he used to say, always full of empowering words, dispelling all of her disconso- late emotions with a soulful strum of his guitar. “Y ou are more than what those worthless hacks in school think of you - screw them! Your blindness doesn’t isolate you from the rest of the world, not if you don’t let it. Only you have the power to do that.” And she had certainly felt isolated, lonely, and forgotten that first day—the day she was left alone to feel the pouring rain soaking through her clothes, Jane nowhere to be found and her mother taking a surprise trip to the ER rather than picking her up from school—the day she met Harper. He hadn’t told her to get out of the way, or asked if she was lost; nor did he whisper, “Is that girl blind?” from afar. He only sat down beside her, asked her how day was, and how come she waited alone here every day—and told her she was pretty. She had nearly taken a mindless whack at him with her cane, certain he was mocking her. But his tone didn’t expose any trace of dishonesty, and he continued every day afterward to compliment a feature of her face; even her eyes, vacuous and unseeing, which she had always thought of only as useless foggy barriers that imprisoned her from experiencing the world the way others did. The year she spent with him was the only time she ever felt she had experienced light. When he was around, she didn’t feel that tugging blackness pull at her heart, she didn’t feel like a shadow standing still while the rest of the earth moved; she felt whole, and sometimes, she even forgot her blindness. They met in this very spot nearly every day without fail, and Harper always had his guitar. She ex- plained how she interpreted sights, colors, and experiences with sounds—and he would do his best to repli- 11