My name means light. I wonder if that’s why I inevitably feel even just a hint of despair come creeping into my soul as the Scandinavian autumn ushers in the darkness of winter. The days gradually get swallowed up into the darkness, more and more with each passing day.

Darkness is a black hole of unknowing, unseeing. It emphasizes your loneliness and makes you cry to hear a friendly voice beside you, to hold a warm hand. You can’t see in darkness. You can’t see what is in the very same space you’re standing in. Snakes could come slithering around your feet, wrapping around your ankles, constricting, to pull you off into the depths of hell. Or something could lash out at you and bite you with its venomous fangs. In the darkness, evil can see you, but you can’t see evil.

Light dispels evil. Snakes don’t dare show themselves in the light of life. There is nothing to fear when light is shining around you, for you can see everything that is there clearly. Nothing can sneak up on you and capture you away to the underworld. Dark beings and creatures of the night fear the light as I fear the dark.

I love autumn as a season, but no matter how happy I become, I just can’t shake the lingering loneliness and the cold that comes with the darkness of the Scandinavian autumn.

There would be one solution to that, I suppose – get a husband.

Well, to be fair, I’m not entirely alone; I have a pet fly named Stanley.

P.S. Stanley escaped out the door a while ago.

Every month a screaming fear stabs me through from back to front, like an inextinguishable jagged sword of flames searing me in two right through the middle. As if my body is doubling over inside itself in anguish and screaming “For the love of God, don’t leave me!!” Wringing itself into a knot, gripping onto my insides with such a violence!

My body seizes up, writhing in despair within itself, as if it is straining to grip excruciatingly onto elusive and denying parents, onto something loving and soft, something safe, gripping onto an illusion of love and screaming “Don’t go!” Oh God it hurts!! Reduces me to a little child, in agony, lying on the couch, weak, worn, crying.

“I need love and softness and warmth,” the little girl said “And I need hugs. Since my birth, my agony and fear have been insufferable without these!”

And my body, desperate for love and softness and warmth, hasn’t understood, that physically torturing me every month does not bring love and softness and warmth.

When you are invisible, you write and people don’t see your words. When you are invisible, you speak and people speak over you, you cry and no one hears you, you take your stand and people walk on you. When you are invisible, you can enter into a room of people, unobserved, and listen and watch. You can read other people without them knowing, you can know them and see inside them, through their words, through their behavior, into their heart, without them even knowing that they are laying themselves bare before you – they can’t see you, they can’t feel you, to them, you are not there.

When you are invisible, unperceived, you can feel a man from across the room, looking into his face, you can feel his pain – you can be moved to tears by his sorrow and yearn to comfort him, but you cannot move, you cannot even speak to him, because you don’t speak his language, because he is a stranger, because he has no idea what you know about him, things you should not know – and he cannot see you.

When you are invisible, you can see a small boy being tormented by the misguided comfort of an adult. You can hear in the boy’s cries, you can feel his tears, he wants to be left alone, but the adult relentlessly “comforts.” Inside, you cannot understand why the adult persists as the child’s cries grow more strained and loud, and all you want to do is shout at the adult to leave the little boy alone, to relieve his escalating stress and the overpowering frustration that gives rise to his wailing and tears. But you cannot, because you are no one, not to be believed, you are invisible.

When you are invisible, you can sit in a classroom as the sound of students’ chatter, the squeaking of chairs, the rustling of papers lulls your mind to sleep, until you sink completely into the depths of the sea of your mind, inside of you, where a deep current carries you very far from your body, in complete serenity, in stark contrast to the loud chaos of the world around you; all of the voices and the noises become as a soft and distant drone. You sit and look around you – you can see the other students, the teacher – you can see from your depth what they are doing “on the surface.” Although they are sitting so close to you, you are looking upon them from so far inside, contemplating the phenomenon and silently asking yourself in your mind “Where am I?” They carry on chatting with one another as if you don’t exist and you are as a spirit hovering in the room.

When you are invisible, you can see all of the things that the visible people can’t see in one another; hidden evils, veiling façades, false pretenses, unperceived misunderstandings, intimate shames, secrets, sorrows…but you must keep it all inside, because since you are invisible, no one believes in you.

*Tunisia/Finland-090704/030505