The Little Eclipse

lisa stathoplos Lincoln, Maine Solar Eclipse April 8, 2024

The Little Eclipse

I die a bit every day. In between my screams of astonished rage, I grow more quiet, more faint. Eclipsed by time. Getting smaller and smaller, less visible, less heard, less important, less useful. Denied even a slight corona. Yet a thousand people live inside me — people I’ve known, those I’ve loved and who’ve loved me, people I’ve watched, secretly, those who judge me and those I’ve judged, beings I’ve imagined, those I’ve become — more alive than some I’ve known — people who lived and breathed and dreamed and loved and hurt and yearned and burned bright then died.

The gifts I was given, the toil, labor, to craft some skill, to hone some meager talent and give something during my brief allotment of time, no longer sought. I am too much or not enough. Am I both? Unseen, unwanted, unheard even as, inside, I wax, feel more expansive and alive, have more to give than ever before, but still have grown less and less, on the wane, so little am I, nearly invisible, such that, to this world, I have become disappeared. The light dims and I question if I ever was. I suspect my actual being. I lost myself to another world even as I discovered galaxies within.

I am not old, old, but, for this time and place, I am either obsolete or I never was. More and more, I believe I never was.

Is it enough to keep breathing? Is it enough to have done one good thing? Is it enough to be enough? Must I shine but once? Can I, should I, go on, so big, so filled with ideas and love and creation that I take too much space and yet am not here?

So every day, I die a little, I shrink a bit, I quell the spring busting to gush forth from deep within me. Staunch it with the force of will that knows it may never be seen or wanted. No eclipse this, eternal night now. I grow big as I grow minuscule, and soon I will be largely gone.

Was I ever here?

lisa stathoplos

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