The Gravity of a Light Bearer

Exactly two times in my life I have been rendered speechless. 

Both involved the sudden locking of eyes onto mine. One pair was the color of a backyard-Valley swimming pool. The other, deep brown beneath impossibly long lashes that had me dreaming of cows. 

Both were unexpected, both left me unable to form words and both belonged to individuals I had never met before.

That morning I had missed the shuttle bus after parking in the North Forty, forcing me to jog to my first class, all the while my backpack slammed against me as if I were carrying a sixty-pound toddler on my back.  

The first year of college feels like a never-ending lesson in movement and timing. I can’t tell you I ever mastered either, and it showed. My mornings were a constant cycle of finding parking, making sure I had all of my books, getting to class on time, trying to concentrate, repacking my bag before jogging to my next class. 

By junior and senior year, it got easier. I was a science major so most of my courses eventually clustered closer together. As a freshman, I was left to hustle between a chemistry lab filled with assignments that took hours to complete while earning me one whole credit, across campus to fulfill my diversity requirement in Music Appreciation which somehow earned me three. 

I had slid into my desk, plopping my over-stuffed bag underneath me just as the person sitting in front of me turned to hand me a neatly stapled stack of syllabi. 

“Take one, pass the rest back.”

Just as I lifted my head, the biggest, brownest, softest eyes looked directly into mine, framed by the most luxurious set of lashes I had ever seen.  Wow. This man has eyelashes like a cow.

He spoke again, trying to insert the papers between my fingers as he motioned with his head over my shoulder. 

But I no more heard him than I heard anything else in the room. There was no sound. There was just me and guy with cow eyes. 

I never responded. He simply leaned closer and passed the papers over my shoulder after sliding one onto the desk in front of me. 

I had raised my hand, my fingers reaching towards those lashes as he turned back and adjusted himself in a desk apparently designed for a twelve year old. My hand remained suspended between us, fingers still outstretched, as if those lashes might somehow come back if I waited long enough. 

When I was twenty-one, I worked at LAX, terminal 1 for an airline that no longer exists. It was swallowed by a company with more; more planes, more employees, more money and then it was consumed again by the Moby Dick of airlines that still exists today. 

There were no boarding passes to scan. Instead, the ticket was pulled by the gate agent-me-who checked that it was for the right flight before motioning for the passenger to enter the jetway. 

With the number of people who passed in front of me every day, I rarely looked up. Glance at the ticket. Check the flight. Motion toward the jetway. 

Efficient, Simple. There was really no need to look up and smile. I mean, seriously. 

But I did. I lifted my head and lost my ability to speak. Swimming-pool blue, the first thing that came to my mind. His eyes were the color of a swimming pool-you know, the kind nearly every Valley home has in its backyard, dotting the landscape like jewels among a sea of tailored lawns and sweeping desert hills that fade into a hazy sunset. 

I mumbled as he tried to insert his ticket into my hand that, once again, was frozen in mid-air. My twenty-one-year-old brain was desperately trying to make sense of what I was seeing, and as I lost myself to the swimming-pool-blue eyes of Joe Montana, the only words I managed to squeak out were, “You’re so shiny.” 

That’s what I said to Joe Montana.  You’re so shiny.

There was no thank you. No, this way.  No professional gesture toward the jetway. Apparently, my mind felt it necessary to comment on the fact that this person simply glowed. 

And, strangely enough, I never forgot either of those moments. Years later, when I began building the people who would inhabit Metis, pieces of those two strangers followed me there. 

The beautiful brown eyes beneath impossibly long lashes became Jaidyn’s. Ray notices them often. She studies them. She has even felt the nearly irresistible urge to reach out and touch them, especially when he is sleeping. I suppose some things never change. 

But the shine became something else.

Molynar, the Sylenwood King, his son Wynn, and the sons who follow their line are light bearers. They carry more Aurelith than other elves, an abundance of the white light that lives within them. There is something subtly luminous about them. They are my Joe Montana. 

They shine.

And of all of them, it was Wynn I chose to render nearly speechless. 

He is a favorite of my readers and I can understand why. Funny, talented, beautiful and shiny. He is my prince who suffers in silence. 

And perhaps more than any other character, he is the one readers ask me to give happiness to. 

Like many, he is stuck in Rayale’s orbit. She gathers people to her like a planet, though perhaps she is more like the sun. To those who live close to her, there is reward in her warmth, her light, her fierce devotion. But there is also the agony of discovering that the same force that draws you near can make it nearly impossible to break free. 

Wynn has spent decades of his life in her light. And perhaps that is the cruelest place for a light bearer to live. How can he truly discover his own gravity-his own power to draw others near, to love and be loved-when he is unable to break free of hers? 

Rayale was Wynn’s first love. 

Long before either of them understood what was happening, they had bound themselves to one another. Among elves, binding is ordinarily something that happens once, between two adults. But Ray has never been an ordinary elf. Time spent together, devotion, moments of intense emotional duress created something neither of them yet had a name for.

For Wynn, however, the name hardly mattered.

He loved her. 

And she became the only woman he had ever loved while belonging to the one man who made loving her impossible: his father. 

Wynn’s silence is an act of love. He suffers because speaking could transfer his suffering to Ray, to his father, or to the family. He is not merely the man who cannot speak, but the man who has decided, again and again, who will bear the pain. 

He will.