Hidden, like the washed out stars in the lunar light, she wept. Bitterly. No one knew but me. No one cared as much as me. Behind the cracking white paint of her attic door, she stifled her sobs and choked on her melancholy. But like those forgotten stars, she still shined with a blazing light. I can even recall,though I doubt my memory at times, a carpet of light stretching out from under the thick oak door. Whether it was the setting sun or the glow of her suffusing halo, the point of the matter is that the light was a ruddy red that imbrued the weathered planks of the floor, and it warmed them so much so that the planks eased into submission. As strange as that sounds, I swear to this day that the wood beneath my bare feet softened from its hard protest against my bodily weight. Although the warmth was inviting, I could never muster up the courage to enter her sanctuary. The closest I ever got to condoling her was flattening the palm of my hand upon the chipping paint and crying silently with her. At that time, I was ten years old and the word abortion was foreign to me. It was an insignificant word that tumbled out from my grandmother's mouth, but whatever it was, it brought about an agonizing, unforgiving, and relentless path for my mother to stumble and collapse onto. She had always been a beam of light in my short four years of life, but after her traumatic experience, which I had known nothing about at the time, the only light I ever enjoyed was that soft radiance creeping out from under the attic door. As little children do, I made up stories in my mind about the light. I invented millions of them to satisfy my hungry need to know why she hid herself from me, but my favorite idea was that her love and beauty was so powerful that she had to barricade herself behind the attic door in order to keep her bursting beams of light from harming me in some overwhelming way.
