Gifts from the Sun
By: Nicolette Mimieux
Tags: Short Story, Earth, Fiction, Oceans

I feel so decadent immediately after being drenched in sunlight. At first, the smell and radiating heat of sun-cooked skin mixes with a hazy sublime tiredness that slowly washes over me. It feels a little bit naughty: an unfairly won lazy euphoria arrived at without effort and full of pleasure.

Although the immediate gratification to my physical form is an intoxication I would happily chase for its own sake, it is not this decadence that has me so fully and wholly in love with being studied by the sun’s gaze. I readily allow my emotions and body their time to cool. As our star’s energy absorbs deeper into my being, the haze fades and and a sharp certainty blooms in its stead. An overwhelming knowledge of myself and of the whole picture, as both the same and different things, sits solidly inside me. When I’m lucky, I make a point to sit there with it. Today I was very lucky, in that I sat there with it and captured what overflowed from me into inked words on the bleached page of my sketchbook. The two pensées (tips hat to Ray Bradbury) to follow are the (lightly edited for flow) product of an hour of starshine shared with a tiny lion of a puppy dog and the late Charlotte Perkins Gilman on my Allston balcony this early spring afternoon. I hope you enjoy.

The Ocean’s Touch: An Education

There is no other touch like Hers.

Cradled in Her, I learn how to hold someone with my arms spread wide.

Rolling along Her surface, partner to Her harmonic, dancing ways; I learn to respect the ancient knowledge stored within and without my fleshy form.

Standing with Her surrounding me, I learn what it means to choose myself over another, to feel Her attempts to persuade me and choose how to cope. I learn consequences. I learn that to love Her is not to just love Her waters, but Her inhabitants, Her influence, Her reactions, how consistently She changes.

Walking out of Her grasp, I learn loss. I learn what you retain from loss — consciously and unconsciously. I learn how to choose what to keep and what to let go of. I learn how to leave and still love, how to leave and come back, how to love unconditionally and generously.

2. Untitled

Somewhere, there is a girl with her head in the clouds pushing her hands and feet solidly into the ground. Her attentions hone in to squidging soil between her toes and fingers, and if you look carefully you can see her dissolve the Heavens into the Earth. The once brown dirt glows into a vibrant stippling of every color beyond imagining; the cosmos shrink into this small park just for her. When she splays her fingers out under its surface, the many rolling hills and deep valleys of the world hum in acknowledgement of her touch.

But just like that, her attentions are lost. Her eyes always sparkling, full of the universe, flit to her watch who’s telling her she has to go. Luckily, the Earth is clever; it clung to her in their brief moment together, seeking passage in the inner lip where her nails and fingertips kiss. Oh, to experience her touch and know her reaction to her world: her heartbeat, her warmth, her sweat. How strange and wonderful to view oneself as such; to feel finite, to age. To only participate in the rest of ourself under perfect circumstance: when undistracted by the maintenance necessary to survive.

“To be alive is such a beautiful tragedy,” the girl thinks to herself without knowing why.