It took me until I was thirty-five years old to realize that all the years I imagined the wind bringing light in an open door or window, the way a warm breeze on a cool day feels like sunlight swept into my waiting arms was an illusion. Light waves may bend or refract off other particles in the wind but they will not be altered completely off course, and surely not so far as to come into a dark room and light it.

I saw light not as a wave of invisible layers but something altogether pliable, like golden dust blowing within the wind. I am not uneducated about this but I preferred the fantasy, the beauty of the image and story I was telling myself than the reality I had learned in my teens. Shimmering, ethereal light bobbing in the air currents, of course this is what light is?!

This happens a lot … the known science versus the magic realism I prefer to inhabit the world and secret hope that one day science will explain and merge all my magic into fact. Instead of taking the time to evaluate the thought of wind moving light, I swept myself up in the idea, the feeling it brought about. It is no less beautiful in it’s truth, but I seek the poetry of living and that means I allow myself to believe in the unreal, the magical, the fantastical because it opens a portal of possibility inside of me… and I am afraid of moving myself too much into my logical mind and unstitching the fabric of my hopes.

So while I know the truth, I prefer the language of the dream. Who here among us can say that in every moment they choose pure logic to a dash of the poetic?

• paige stewart

photo by Anna Jones of me