Grasping Sunbeams

A personal essay by Josh Menden

I miss it, I crave it. I ache to possess something that is truly unpossessable, to be at once familiar and in awe of something of which I am largely ignorant. Can I ever learn to capture innocence like I did as a child?

When I was younger — maybe six or seven — I used to watch the sunlight pour into my bedroom through the window. It fascinated me: at once linear and amorphous, the way it split haphazardly in

distorted shapes on my navy blue bunk bed and shag carpet floor, how it sheared straight, distinct lines of darkness, mangled occasionally by an impeding object or moving limb. Staring at the trapezoids and triangles etched in light convinced me that the light itself was wholly tangible, graspable, touchable.

In the intermediate space, between the window and the floor, the incoming sunlight illuminated little specks of dust as they floated randomly through the air, reappearing and disappearing as they flirted with the divide between light and dark. The way they floated, so random and free, visible only within the box of sunlight — it dawned on me: I was witnessing rays of light. Not some nebulous stream of light, nor the feeling and notion of light as I now understand it, but actual rays of light: those particles, those little specks, were themselves the rays, and I was watching as they entered my bedroom.

In those days, regularly, around five o’clock just before the sunset, I raced to my bedroom to catch the rays of light. Lunging out with tiny fingers, clenching them tightly around a sunbeam before the movement in the air of my thrusting could send them scattering, I held it tightly in my golf ball fist. Just to be sure I had succeeded, I held my hand up to the direct light of the window and slowly peeled away my fingers: first my thumb, to reveal the cavern within my palm, then my pointer finger followed deliberately by my middle. Against the brilliant setting sun, the edges of my gripped fingers glowed translucent pink, radiating with fleshy brilliance the sunbeam I held within. As my hand began to open up, the ray of light would fully escape; I would lower my hand from the light and my fingers would regain their usual hue.

It never occurred to me to try and permanently capture one of these light rays — if I could hold one in my hand, I most certainly could have tried to stuff it in my pocket, cap it in a jar, or zip it tightly in my lunch box. But no, I was content to catch and release, to hold and then let go, to watch it slowly rejoin its fellow sunbeams.

Regularly, steadily, routinely, I thrilled at the chance to wrangle another ray of light into my own fist, then gently let it go of my own free will. Grasp the light, hold it, turn it over in my hands, examine it, release it; grasp the light, hold it, turn it over in my hands, examine it, release it. Each time was no less exciting than the last, and when it was finally time for dinner, I gladly left: the sunlight would be just as present and just as capturable tomorrow anyways.

I no longer take such joy in simple repetition, nor express such comfortable wonder at things I do not completely understand. Worse still, I’m uncertain I would even allow myself the time to stumble into such repetitive and wonderful activities if I were prone to them in the first place. If I don’t understand something, I Google it; if I must do something repeatedly, I will listen to an audiobook as I do so. In the metaphysical bedroom of my adulthood, I've drawn the curtains on my sunbeams, opening them for strictly utilitarian purposes. I have successfully evicted all magic from the airtight agenda of my day to day.

And I miss it, I crave it. I ache to possess something that is truly unpossessable, to be at once familiar and in awe of something of which I am largely ignorant, to not process and reprocess the possibilities and implications of every moment, of every thing, of every one. I wish to scale back; to accept a thing as it is presented to me, no more nor less; to just as easily accept a beginning as an ending.

One day, I hope to regain my ability to capture sunbeams. For now, I will be content just to reminisce.