There comes a point in December when I crave color and obsessively light candles. I think of my mother who loved Christmas decorations, candles, actually any kind of light. She photographed the flowers on the table over and over again. She aimed to capture shape, line, color, and shadow. As her daughter, I was often critical of her efforts. But now, when she appears in my dreams, I can see she photographed like she painted.

After my mother’s sudden death, I was lonely for our conversations. I wanted to dream her back into my life. But every time she appeared in my dreams I woke due to my excitement. Now, when she appears in my dreams, she asks what have we done with her candles? Where are her poetry books that towered alongside her bed? It’s like she is asking for the life underneath the objects. My memories of her holds the weight of my childhood. I made up dances; we made books together; she saved many of my early pots and squirreled them away in the backs of cabinets. These objects, colors, candles, and poems hold more than their edges and continue to ignite many stories.

At first I was lonely, but then I was
curious. The original fault was that I could
not see the lines of things. My mother could.
She could see shapes and lines and shadows,
but all I could see was memory, what had been
done to the object before it was placed on
the coffee table or the nightstand. I could sense
that it had a life underneath it. Because
of this, I thought I was perhaps bad at seeing. Even
color was not color, but a mood. The lamp was
sullen, a candlestick brooding and rude with its old
wax crumbling at its edges, not flame, not a promise
of flame. How was I supposed to feel then? About
moving in the world? How could I touch anything
or anyone without the weight of all of time shifting
through us? I was not, or I did not think I was, making
up stories; it was how the world was, or rather it is how
the world is. I’ve only now become better at pretending
that there are edges, boundaries, that if I touch
something it cannot always touch me back.

—Ada Limón, The Endlessness, The New Yorker, Sept 4, 2023