It was about 50 years ago. The four of us children waited for the moment just gone by in that Chicago southwest suburb as I am writing. Five, four, three, two, one and out into the near zero temperature we skipped following our mother. In the dead black beginning of something fresh, we pounded on pots and pans yelling happy New Year. We did this gingerly as the icy air cut quick through our pajamas. It seems in memory that no one up or down the street came out to look. Were they deaf or already asleep we did not know.

In years to come we would still make noise until the year our mother was sick then next year gone. We saw what a year could do. A whole new perspective settles even over children like wet sticky snow into black ink. There was not to be a bright new beginning. Numbers and an hour no longer seemed magical, but more like Santa Clause, one more cold truth to pile upon unveiled fairy tales, left available for the ever naive.

This year when right in the middle of putting up the Christmas lights I love to shine for the still wondrous in each of us, our wonderful cat Smokey was killed. Those next days I dragged those lines of lights around as if they were chains. They sunk a murky anchor into those fifty years in that sense that abandonment leaves a feeling that love itself has fallen ill, or fallen overboard and drowning.

That illness is bitter in its sweetness. Someone else’s life flashes before you in poignant bits and pieces, but now its memory is up to you. That torch, that sound, that something instead of nothingness. The other side of love is a gaping void, a never-land of nevermore, yet to have love we must shake hands with the essence of nothingness.

Death is always a passing point for love, where value both vanishes and is simultaneously created, where it becomes up to you and I to insist it be made loud and clear into or lives. A new light into the night casting away the shadows of ignorance. Knowing love itself, is the key to any year or any moment.

Benafia