I take my seat along the long edge of a majestic mahogany bar, its shape curling like a giant question mark. The glossy finish catches the overhead lights, creating small pools of cool white light every few feet. Amber hobnail candleholders amplify the yellow-orange flames within, casting washes of warmth across the reddish-brown wood—amber dissolving into red like a Rothko canvas. I lose myself in the grain, tracing its darkened fingers across the surface, listening as the scars and scuff marks whisper of resilience and decay, how time both hardens and erodes what it once forged.
I perch on a rustic bentwood stool, its back rising ten inches from the seat along a curve tilted at eighty degrees. The finish has worn thin, edges peeled to reveal the pale plywood beneath. Still, the interplay of exposed wood and dark stain delights me, and I can’t help but smile at its rough, weathered beauty.
Above me, pressed-tin ceiling panels, embossed with beading and fleur-de-lis, symmetrical and ordered on all sides, catch light from above and below. They shimmer in shifting hues, each cast shaped by the mingling of different bulbs and color temperatures—sometimes pulling my gaze along their reflections, other times holding me still to savor the glow that reveals their fine textures.
Something in the glow reminds me of when I sought meaning elsewhere, when I believed only in the grandeur of vast systems of science and philosophy, in the great ideas that promised grand revolutions of thought. I longed to stand inside those intellectual storms, to feel the upheaval as they remade the world in the name of logic and reason.
No longer.
At least not today, anyway.
This light speaks for how my wants are different now, how they've changed—smaller, simpler, yet heavier with meaning. I want to love and be loved. To be moved by the hidden wonders that flicker behind shadows, by the fleeting illuminations that pass across wood and tin and flesh alike. To breathe in every shard of light that touches the living world.