Annie G. Rogers - A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy

L ight filters down among the stacks inside the librarys cool vault. Dust motes swirl in the air, tiny particles of color in the muted light. I hold a stone in my hands, small, with a little dip in the very center, little dipper of a stone, cooler than the air and my handsso I warm it before dropping it into the pocket of my skirt. I begin to sort through my pile of references, assorted scraps of paper. In the vaulted air a little circle of dust motes spins in the cool light, whirled high in space. I follow it around a corner and down a row marked PA2065. Before me stands a child (in a university library?) directly under the circling light, a child of perhaps five or six, no more, straining to see the titles above her eye level. She glances at me and gestures toward a black volume two shelves over her head. Amused, I hand her the book, a heavy volume with a title in Latin, complete with gilded pages. The child sits down in the aisle, immediately bent over this book. I remember her clearly: a child with light hair, impossibly at ease with herself, wearing a gray-and-red dress. I step over her legs, then turn to look back. Her eyes are on me, radiant, and a light moves over her whole face and lights up the librarys cool vault. I have never seen such intelligence and love in a childs face. Searching everywhere for my thoughts, for the words that would accompany me into speech with her, I drop my piles of pages, look up to meet those eyes again. There, where she was, the spinning light of dust motes in the all-colored air moves up to the ceiling, and up through the ceiling.

I pound up the marble stairs, my feet a thunder and drumming in my ears, to the reading room aboveabout where she stoodbut nothing. Heads bent over books... A young man, chewing a pencil, looks out into the August heat and haze. I rush outside, to look for her across the courtyard. The dry hot air takes the slow hiss of sprinklers back and forth over triangles of grass, water over the golden crisscrossing walks.

I tell you, this light stays. I cant separate the light from the silenceit burnishes my skin, a memory like a photographand leaves in my ears a roar of silence, deafening. You could say, The child did not exist, or if she did, she did not vanish as you imagine. And perhaps this is so. On the other hand, some angels yearn to be recognized, but cant bear to be exposed too long in the light they themselves cast over the human world.