It’s a dark and stormy night. Except it’s mid-afternoon in a
sweltering July and the only reason you’re inside writing at all is you
hate sweating and my, those mosquitos. When it’s not raining anymore,
those darned bugs attack like you’re the only lifeform still harboring
blood.

Dozens of crumpled pieces of paper litter the
floor of your office. Post-it notes, unpaid bills, a seven-year-old’s
drawing, all miniscule paper-plane crashes. Meanwhile, a blank Word
document glares at you from your computer, occasionally breaking into
the screensaver where your name balloons and pops across the screen.

Lord, you say broodingly,
This little light of mine, how am I ever going to let it shine? The
seven-year-old comes in asking where is the white board and markers and
erasure because she wants to play school and can you be the student and
she’ll give you a spelling test and your husband wanders in wondering
where you left the lunch meat. You tell him in the fridge in the meat
drawer and can’t he find anything on his own? And the teenager saunters
in because please, please, please can she go to the party tonight,
everyone else is? And you realize that this light, after all, is but a
Target lamp just like everyone else’s, a Pier One knock-off that you
couldn’t afford until it made it to the cheaper store and then went on
sale.

Your eye catches the remains of your lunch on the
floor, a still-life of a half-eaten and now browned apple, fake-cheese
crumbs from the Cheetos you polished off, and two bites left of your
ham sandwich, the teeth marks revealing the turn in your top front
tooth. A veritable Van Gogh, you snort to the dog, who is practicing
his "leave it" command while drooling over the plate. Perhaps fit only
for Monet when his vision failed him and his reds and broad brush
strokes hid the flaws.
Then it hits you, that Target lamp knocked
off from Pier One and bought on clearance isn’t like everyone else’s
because not everyone has a chip superglued back on and hid in the back,
even if you have to turn it every time you walk in the room because
someone has invariably moved it so that the superglued chip shows in
the front. And not everyone has a lamp with a Cerelean Crayola line
across the top of the shade where the seven-year-old back when she was
three decided to draw a sky on it. And how long has that Kraft macaroni
been stuck to the switch like an arts-n-crafts project?

You
turn back to your computer and begin typing your own still-life that
may have the exact same fruit as everyone else but will be all your
own. You’re gonna let it shine. Let it shine, let it shine, let it
shine.