Lights Out

Sitting at the table with the last light of the afternoon keeping the room glowing, I didn't realize that the power on the cerro had gone out until I finally rose in the graying space and flicked the switch.

I walked down the hill to pick up the pizza I had ordered. Customers sat around candles of various sizes. For some reason, people speak more quietly in the dark, surrounded by candles. I collected my pizza and completed the transaction half under my breath. Parting from my friend at the street corner, I half ran up the steps that run along the side of the ruined stretch of Templeman, where the road has been replaced by rubble and stray bushes. The light was fading and I was thinking of my cavernous apartment and unlocatable flashlight.

I stumbled through the entry way and into the blank space of my apartment. In the dining room, the windows were still letting in a faint hint of light. I rummaged through drawers: tea lights, I know that I saw tea lights. I found them, on my knees in the invisible kitchen, and brought them back to the table. I dropped five of them into the rounded shot glasses that came with the apartment, and they made that satisfying sound: something soft and light cased in cheap metal hitting glass. The sound makes me think of my parents' dinner parties when I was a child, and of Christmas and Thanksgiving at their house.

The house was quiet and empty, my roommate sleeping in his room. My third roommate called to say that she would not come home from her boyfriend's. Lighting my candles and arranging my book, I thought back to another night without electricity. It was in a February, in Morocco, in a small apartment whose walls held no ceiling save in the small cubbies that were bedrooms. After brushing my teeth under stars of an unknown continent, I walked on bare feet across the cold kitchen floor into the tiny room with walls of stone. The bed was a shelf knocked into the wall. As I rubbed my feet under not enough blankets and spoke softly with good company, I remember the three stubs of candles that were stuck onto the deep rock sill of the tiny window at the foot of the bed. The wind picked up, but the crashing sound of waves was loudest outside the little wooden shutter behind the flames. I fell asleep that night, and the nights after, listening through these sounds for my breath and for the other breath beside me, the both of us breathing air so far away from anything previously known.

Tonight I arranged my candles in a semicircle around my chair and lone place setting. I poured some wine, took a bite of food, and opened my book. I've only just begun it, but I am far enough along to know that I am reading of a man whose past still grips him with its mysteries and pain. I know that I will read this book and feel an echo. There is something of this in the life of any person far from home without intentions of permanacy. Our lives here are a flicker; they began recently enough to be recalled in every detail; it is sure that they will end sometime soon in an airport, under flourescent light. The most intimate of friends made here can know only this short burst of time. When we mirror each other, we can see only the present tinted by the stories we tell over coffee, over tea, over wine and beer, staring out windows and tracing the rims of cups with our fingers. We tell each other that we lived before, will live later, but we exist only in the present and these other times are only stories.

I am thinking of these things in the dark, with the lights of the other, unaffected cerros of Valparaiso shining against the negative space surrounding my building. In the quiet, alone, I think of the company that is missed, and the history that cannot follow me here. In this unexpected, unadulterated space of the blackout, the shapes of that history fill the room and although it shakes me, I welcome them.

I call no one because I welcome them. Then the door to the side swings open and my sleepy roommate brings out flashlights from his camping supplies. I strap a light to my head just as my tea lights are reaching the end of their short lives. This is when I feel sad. The thin thread has snapped that had connected these temporary candles and this solitary darkness to those other misshappen candles casting dancing shadows against a stone wall, not so very long ago. But this is how we live, now, in this flare within my history. It won't be long before I sit with other candles and my heart pulls for the lonely nights in Valparaiso. So I laugh at myself, spill out my words, and return to my book and my work.