Before I leave, please let me tell you a story.
You’re in the bathroom of a trendy sandwich shop in Richmond on one of your last weekends of undergrad. It must be an old building, because the bathroom is a single room tucked in the back corner of the restaurant, up a step and oddly trapezoidal.
You’ve been catching up with a friend who graduated last year — talking about his job, your grad school plans, and how to strategically choose your sandwich order so as to not appear childish but still ensure you pick something your finicky palate can handle.
As there has been for a number of days (possibly weeks, it’s been hard to keep track of recently), there is a little family of butterflies that have taken up residence in your stomach. Now that you’re alone in the bathroom, they can finally voice their opinions.
The father butterfly opines that you should just buck up and get on with it! You’re young and you should be having fun.
The mother butterfly tries to comfort you with gentle words and reassurances, but her soft wings on the lining of your stomach just tickle.
The sister and brother butterfly don’t have too much to add to the conversation, but all their flapping about mixes up your lunch in your stomach and makes you start to feel ill.
You try to calm yourself down, splashing water onto your face like you see people do in the movies. It doesn’t do much for you, and now there is water on your shirt, which you hope your friend won’t notice. There isn’t time for you to wait for it to dry — you’ve been away from the table for too long anyway.
As you reach for the door handle to leave, you search for the lightswitch to flip.
I still.
Taped to the wall beneath the dirty lightswitch is a little piece of paper, faded and slightly gray. In careful, sharpie-black cursive, someone has written the words “Please leave the light on, darling”.
I don’t usually like it when someone calls me pet names. Sweetheart, babe, dear, all the above. They ring hollow, impersonal and unnecessary.
But somehow, on this insignificant piece of paper, I am touched by its gentleness. It’s unnecessary, sure, but that’s what made it beautiful to me at that moment. Those extra seconds — spent on a comma that seems to wrap around my shoulder in a tender hug and a looping term of endearment given freely, casually to a stranger — feel quiet but precious.
It reminds me of the song “Light On” by Maggie Rogers. Of, “If you keep reaching out / I’ll keep coming back” and, “If you leave the light on / Then I’ll leave the light on.” Of listening to this song stripped down at her concert here a couple of weeks ago with my older sister and feeling calm even when crowds tend to make me a bit nervous.
It makes me hope that something I write or do or say has meant something to someone here, has been a little light in some small way. And it reminds me that as I leave this place and this community, stepping out of the restroom and into the real world, that other people, all the time, are creating and leaving lights all around for me and for you.
Thank you, darling. For looking for the lights and leaving them on for whoever comes next.
