On Streetlights, Waiting, and the Passage of Time

Often at night I would catch myself watching the dim amber glow of the streetlight by our fence. I'd sit on my bed in the dark, sheer curtains drawn half-shut, radiator humming somewhere along the obscure perimeter of the room. The only brightness came from, ironically, the blackness outside—the corner of the street over which the light stood—and it was a crepuscular brightness that cast deep shadows on anything beyond its reach: the grass tips ruffling in the wind, the groaning clapboards, the cracks in the cement road that hadn't been filled for as long as I'd been here. Seconds would pass, and minutes, and hours. By then I'd begin to wonder what I was waiting for. Watching, I've found, is never not in conjunction with waiting, and it seemed that every time, I was waiting for something quite different from the last.

A while back, I wrote a short vignette about my fifteen-year-old self crossing paths with who I used to be twelve years before—unbearably familiar and yet a perfect stranger—the type of oneiric encounter that dispels into blurry might-have-beens the moment you wake. In the vignette, I spoke of streetlamps and moths, of ambition, of freedom's end:

She liked the glittering lights, the flickering streetlamps. I told her about the moths trapped inside. That’s the end of infinity, I said. Ambition is the end of infinity.

Maybe it was not the passage of time that makes everything seem more beautiful in hindsight but the conversations we have in our minds with the people we had been once, long ago, now foreign to us. Perhaps we never truly understood what growing up meant. Were we waiting for a lifelong aspiration to be achieved unattended? Were we longing to become moths who die to their ambitions? And was I staring out at the streetlight in hopes that its brightness, of its own volition, would come to me, swallow me whole?