One Imaginary Firefly

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Let me be precise about this, because precision is the only thing standing between me and a full-blown episode of self-congratulatory delusion. Nothing has changed. Not one blessed, cursed thing. The money situation is still a situation. The work situation is still a situation. The brain chemistry is still doing whatever the hell it does when it decides that Tuesday afternoon is the perfect time to contemplate the void. All of it, every last unlovely detail, still sitting exactly where I left it, like furniture nobody wants to buy.

And yet.

The fog is lighter. Not gone. Lighter. I want to be very careful with this distinction, because the moment I say the fog is lighter, some cheerful bastard inside my head starts planning a parade, and I have been to that parade before. It ends with everyone going home and me sweeping up the confetti of my own optimism.

But there it is. A thinning. A translucence where there used to be opacity. And somewhere in that thinning, impossibly far away, something glimmers.

A firefly, maybe. One. In a tunnel so long and so dark that calling it a tunnel feels like an insult to tunnels, which at least have engineers and blueprints and a municipal budget. This tunnel has none of those things. This tunnel has me, fifty-one years old, standing in the middle of it, squinting.

The firefly, I should mention, is probably imaginary. I want that on record. I am not claiming to have discovered an actual insect with actual bioluminescence performing actual navigation in the corridor of my personal despair. I am claiming that my brain, for reasons it has not disclosed to me, has decided to render a small point of light where previously it rendered nothing but more corridor.

This is not nothing. This is also not something. This is the peculiar, maddening in-between where I have been asked to live, apparently, because nobody consulted me about the accommodations.

I am still fifty-one. This number has not budged. It sits on me like a damp wool coat that someone convinced me was fashionable in a previous decade. Fifty-one, with all the technical knowledge and professional experience and hard-won expertise that one accumulates across five decades of being alive and paying attention, and none of it, not one ounce, has transmuted itself into the kind of financial stability that lets a person sleep through a night without performing emergency arithmetic at three in the morning.

I have tried being knowledgeable without money. Let me tell you how that goes. It goes like this: you know things. You know quite a lot of things, actually. You can discuss systems and architectures and methodologies with a fluency that would make your younger self proud. And then someone asks you what you had for lunch and you say, with the quiet dignity of a scholar, whatever was cheapest.

The knowledge does not convert. The experience does not compound. The capability sits there, magnificent and unemployed, like a cathedral in a ghost town.

But the fog is lighter.

I keep returning to this because it is the only thing that has moved, and I need to understand why it moved, and whether it will stay moved, and whether I am allowed to feel grateful for something so small without immediately being punished for the audacity of gratitude. These are the questions I ask myself at three in the morning, when the emergency arithmetic has finished and the quieter mathematics begin, the ones where I calculate how much time I have left and how much of it I have already spent becoming capable of things that apparently do not pay.

The firefly does not answer these questions. The firefly simply glows, intermittently, at a distance I cannot measure, in a direction I cannot confirm.

I have spent a considerable portion of my adult life being suspicious of hope. Not because hope is inherently suspicious, but because hope has, on multiple occasions, arrived at my door wearing a very convincing costume, and I have let it in, and it has used my bathroom and eaten my food and then revealed itself to be something else entirely, usually something with teeth. So I have learned to check. I have learned to ask for identification. I have learned to look for the seams in the costume, the place where the zipper catches, the telltale sign that what I am looking at is not hope but its cheaper, more dangerous cousin, which is expectation wearing hope’s clothes.

And yet here I am, standing in my tunnel, watching a light that I have almost certainly invented, and feeling something that I hesitate to name because naming it gives it power and I am not sure I trust it with power.

The thing about being fifty-one and precarious and depressed and still somehow sentient enough to notice all three is that you develop a very particular relationship with time. Time stops being a resource and starts being a creditor. Every day that passes is a day that has been spent and cannot be refunded. Every year that goes by without the situation improving is a year added to the ledger, and the ledger does not care about your explanations. The ledger does not care that you were sick, or that the economy was strange, or that the industry shifted, or that your brain chemistry decided to spend several years treating every positive thought like an intruder that needed to be subdued. The ledger simply records: another year, another year, another year.

And then one day you wake up and the fog is a little lighter and you can see a firefly, and the first thing you think is not how beautiful, but how far.

How far, and whether there is enough road left to reach it, and whether the road even goes in that direction, and whether the firefly will still be there when I arrive, or whether it will have moved, or dimmed, or turned out to be the reflection of something in my own eye, a phosphene, a trick, a nothing.

I am tired of preparing. I am tired of becoming ready for a life that keeps not starting. I am tired of the gap between what I can do and what I am asked to do, between what I know and what I am paid to know, between the person I have become and the circumstances I am forced to inhabit. I am tired, and the tiredness is not the clean tiredness of someone who has worked hard and earned rest. It is the tiredness of someone who has spent years carrying water in a sieve and being asked why the bucket is empty.

And yet.

The fog is lighter, and in the lighter fog, a thought appears that would normally be intercepted before reaching consciousness. The thought is this: maybe something will change. Not everything. Not dramatically. Not with trumpets. But something. A small shift. A door that was stuck becoming slightly less stuck. A possibility that was invisible becoming faintly visible, like a star that you can only see when you stop looking directly at it.

I can hold this thought without immediately crushing it. That is new. That is the actual news, if we are being honest, which I try to be even when honesty is the last thing anyone wants, including me. The news is not that my life has improved. It hasn’t. The news is that my ability to imagine improvement has returned, slightly, tentatively, like a cat that left the house in a huff and is now standing at the door pretending it never left.

I don’t trust it. Let me be clear. I don’t trust the lightness or the firefly or the thought or any of it. I have been burned by my own brain too many times to trust a mood. Moods are weather, not climate. They pass. They reverse. They arrive with flowers and leave with the furniture.

But I am also tired of not trusting. There is a cost to the distrust, a daily tax on the soul, a kind of spiritual scurvy that comes from refusing all forms of emotional vitamin C because you once ate an orange that turned out to be wax. At some point the refusal becomes its own punishment, and the punishment becomes habitual, and the habit becomes identity, and suddenly you are the person who doesn’t hope, and you are very good at it, and it is killing you slowly, politely, with excellent manners and a complete absence of surprise.

The firefly asks nothing of me. This is its primary virtue and its primary deception. A thing that asks nothing cannot be blamed when nothing is delivered. I invented it precisely because it demands nothing, because it glows without requiring me to earn the glow, because it exists, if it exists, in the realm of pure possibility, and possibility is the one country I can still afford to visit.

I don’t know if there is a path under the firefly. I don’t know if the firefly marks an exit or merely a spot where the tunnel wall catches light differently. I don’t know if I will have the energy to walk toward it, or whether walking toward it will collapse the distance, the way dreams collapse when you try to describe them to someone else.

I know only that the fog is lighter and that I am looking, and that looking is not nothing, and that for someone who has spent years training himself not to look, not to hope, not to want, not to need, the act of looking toward a light, even an imaginary one, even a probably imaginary one, even a certainly imaginary one if we are being rigorous about it, which I always am, which is part of the problem, the act of looking is a small rebellion against my own machinery.

The machinery says: don’t bother. The machinery says: you know how this ends. The machinery says: the tunnel is the tunnel is the tunnel and the firefly is a hallucination and the fog will return and you will be back where you started, older by however many days it took you to walk toward a light that was never there.

The machinery is probably right. The machinery usually is. That is what makes it machinery.

But the fog is lighter. And the firefly, imaginary or not, is glowing. And I am standing here, fifty-one years old, broke and tired and overeducated and underemployed and chemically betrayed and existentially overdrawn, and I am looking at it.

I am looking at it.

That is all. That is the entire event. A man in a tunnel, looking at a light he probably invented, feeling something he cannot name, wanting something he cannot verify, hoping, despite everything, despite himself, despite the machinery and the ledger and the arithmetic and the years, hoping that the light is real, or that it doesn’t matter whether it is real, or that the looking itself is a kind of walking, a kind of movement, a kind of proof that the tunnel has not yet won.

The fog is lighter. I keep looking. Somewhere far ahead, or nowhere at all, something glows.