There are little altars everywhere in the world, places where you can lay down your suffering for a while. Hollowed-out oak trunk by the forest trail where you leave acorns and pine cones and worries you’ve gathered on a cushion of moss, whose patience softens everything. Or the bench at the busy intersection where streams of people crossing the street parted around you, and you fell in love with each of them—the men in suits, babies strapped in strollers—and left your fear crumpled there like a useless receipt. Or the shelf where you keep the box of your mother’s ashes next to an electric candle that flickers day and night, how you give your grief to the yellow glow of that false flame over and over, knowing that even the plainest of light can be enough sometimes to hold your pain.
