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“All Light is Eternal” is a short story submitted by Andrea Posadas for Gully Books‘ I Love To Write Day.
The sun was a writer. That was the first thing she discovered.
But she didn’t learn about it right away. She had to picture the sun first. For as long as she could remember, she’d mistaken the sun for the most mundane objects—from the styrofoam meteor on her school’s model of the solar system, to when the Little Einsteins danced to Mozart on planet Venus on TV. She was getting bored of her imagination playing games with her, so she stepped out. Perhaps, she thought, she could see the sun through whatever lay under it. One of which was the school playground’s yellow tire swing. She swore, it looked so much like the sun. She thought it was some deformed comet tied to a rope. She said to herself then, brows furrowed, “If I could touch the sun like this—sit on it, even, then it must’ve been just like me in its past life.” Meaning, a daydreamer. A mind that couldn’t be put to rest. It walked the same streets, shared the same dreams as her, and most especially, it wrote.
And it wrote beautifully.
The sun wrote its whole memory lane. Much like how she aspired to tell tales of the world’s wonders under the sun, it wrote whatever it saw as it shed light from above. It was a fictionist, maybe; it must’ve had a knack for heroes almighty who glowed with nobility in every step. Or a sullen poet, constantly frustrated over words that just couldn’t rhyme, or a mishap in rhythm, a thorn in the vines of time. Fortes were worn like a badge they were, and best showcased in the sun’s broadest of times, for they were reserved for people like her–the ever-present, ever-growing, ambitious youth. She, for one, figured this out quite earlier than the rest.
The daydreamer was at the prime of her childhood when she shared the same dream with the radiant spirits of the school playground, and that was to see the sun write with her own two eyes. She wished to write with the sun, not under it, as if talking to an elder companion or her life mentor. She could only learn so much from it if she tried.
And she did. She chose to be just like the sun. She was going to be its little sunbeam. She wanted to write words that created shapes, spaces, and colors under leaves, ripples of roughness and smoothness on sand, golden complexions with sheens of amber on people’s skin, and rays of sunshine–hope and happiness, rather–that reached the hearts of those who deserved it.
Her heart-to-heart with the yellow tire swing had always been her favorite. Little did the child adventurer know that she saw the world with a more vibrant part of her mind than everyone else.
What she discovered next about the sun was that it had the world as its canvas, and the world stopped to witness it write.
Which, initially, wasn’t at all that shocking to her. After all, she’d figured this out when she was older. She’d grown a few inches taller, aged a few years wiser. She’d seen much more of the world than what was encased in the four corners of the playground. (She’ll surely miss the yellow tire swing, though.) “Express yourself” was the most powerful statement that resonated in her mind by then. As soon as she was introduced to it, she thought of how people could have all the resources in the world to make a name for themselves, and the sun would still outshine them (literally). It made a fortress out of duty. In it, it was invincible. It made its own spotlight, instead of looking for one that fit any other talented soul. However, she wouldn’t exactly call it fame. The sun, she learned as she watched it poke up above the city from her bedroom window, never shone atop the world out of desperation, anyway. When her heart was resonating with her favorite singers’ voices and melodies that made them… them, she thought, they had the world as their stage. When photographers went on quests for the perfect creations to showcase in their portfolio, the world was their subject. At the brink of a childhood dream, that’s fame. Honest-to-goodness recognition. She, too, would eventually become the world to someone who treated her heart like an irreplaceable treasure that not even the most hidden of gems could replace. But those were people. This was the sun she was talking about. A celestial body. A star. And when a star found its way to fearlessness, there was just no telling how powerful its audience could get.
As its audience’s only member, she learned that the sun wrote more than the light it shed. It wrote life.
It seemed like she was the only person in the whole world who knew how to describe it. She remembered how a close friend of hers loved running marathons under the sun, its scorching heat fueling his desire to have gold hung around his neck. She remembered climate change; extreme temperatures and changes in them in particular that pushed people to their boiling points on days that were already at their boiling points themselves. She remembered the sun’s many other inconveniences that burdened the people around her as the first beam of light pierced through her skin. People just couldn’t appreciate the sun like she did.
They couldn’t see its life the way she did, either. When the sun wrote, it stood proudly, mid-heaven at summer’s peak. It was the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it stopped in its rotation. Diligent and earnest, it rolled up, hanging closest to heaven for hours until it made its way westward as its journey was about to end. The light of dawn sparkled gold. It glowed all around her. It was a perfect balance of noise and silence with its blinding noons and white mornings. Her skin smoothed to velvet as streaks of light swam around it like a mirage, reflected through her bedroom windows and onto the surface of her blanket. Sunsets were tattered blazes of pink and red, teetering on land like spilt paint. It felt amazing, following the sun’s rays down a long, winding road, to see another one, and beyond that the warm violet of coming home. The late sun’s brilliance seeped through nightfall in scattered beams, until its remnants were but flashes of hope against the ripples in her vision.
On that day, she found it. A ribbon that tied her to keepsakes. It was life.
Always new, always growing, always moving on.
Whatever the sun wrote, she learned a little too late, it stopped it right where it was.
The sun’s last stains were melting away on that same magical day. It was then that the sun met her for the first time. Her heart raced a mile a minute. Her backbone felt like a duct of cold, running water. But her head was fearlessly calm. The sun then came to her like a spontaneous gift, being the only warmth left at that time of things turning blue. At that very moment, the sun became a friend. Her friend. It accompanied her with a gentleness—almost a childlike one—and the way it looked at her made her feel important. Loved. It was a warm feeling that wasn’t the least bit new, but God knew she’d do anything to relive the moment again and again.
She was heading home, but she was not alone. Closing the gates on her inhibitions, she now opened her heart to the sun’s deepest secret. She flinched as it was drilled straight into the menace of her head, the dark part that sheltered all her oldest fears. For a second, she wished to slip away and head home alone, to her real home, but this wasn’t something she could experience every day.
The sun was a writer to no readers. And that sealed the deal for her. She stayed. She stayed with no intentions of leaving anytime soon.
“Words, they live and die,” said the sun. “Believe it or not, even their lives are borrowed from heaven. But the way I write? It’s a lost cause. I carry water from streams and to the clouds, watch it rain into the ocean—it’s a wheel. The clouds and water, they’re part of it, but they never are the same. Even the moon shifts in its phases. I, however, stay as I am. All my beams searing, all my bruises chilling. Forever.”
She couldn’t even imagine what forever was.
“That’s how the life you see is supposed to be,” the sun continued. “I write life as I control the wheel. While the world exists to wake up, to sleep, I’m still. I just am. I can’t exactly say I live, for I can’t live without death. Your favorite writers, the humans, they write for the people on the same wheel as them. They have friends who live with them, move with them. I don’t.”
All at once, her mind was immersed in understanding. How brave was the sun to accept its fate like that? How could it bear writing beauty on earth amidst a tragic ending it knew all too well? A voluntary exit from the world and into mere existence. No protesting. No hesitating. She fought against it and silenced it immediately. When the sun seemed to notice her battle from within, it reinforced its life upon her in the kindest sense, as if the sun made sure that she’d never end up the same way. Instead, it treasured their friendship on a note of hope.
“I want to live again.”
She promised to be the sun’s first reader, but never its only one.
It came to greet her many days after that, and within those days, she’d created the brightest, strongest wheel she could muster with a youthful glow that never, ever faltered. It was her gift to the sun, in exchange for the life it wrote. It held the wheel tightly in its rays, nurtured it like a mother to her child, and outlined it with its unwavering wonder, the same playfulness she’d first seen at the playground. The sun was no longer to exist forever, but its life was. And to her, that was the most beautiful daydream she could ever ask for.
