by Marin Sardy

When I remember Girdwood I remember two places: Girdwood in summer, Girdwood in winter. One is green and one is white, and the white one is dark because that is how Alaska is. And I know that you won’t really believe me but it’s the truth and no amount of explaining can make you get it, I guess. You just have to see it. It’s the same with the northern lights. Like when I was in Ecuador, trying to explain, and I realized they were picturing something like fireworks and it was really hard to make them see what I saw in my head.

But that’s what I want you to do right now—see what I see in my head. One night in December, right around New Year’s. That week after Christmas when we were all home from college, and we’d gone out to the bar and were walking back to Dad’s cabin in the snow, which was banked high on the roadside by the plows. I was with Tom and maybe somebody else, and we looked up and there they were.

When they’re dim, they’re pink, pale yellow, soft blue. But this night, they were not dim. And Girdwood is a small town so there were few city lights to obscure them. And it wasn’t just a little ribbon winding up—they were all over the sky. You had to move your head and look around a bit to take it all in. Red, green, bright white. It was shocking, the red, but especially the white. Coming down in all directions, leaping toward the top of the dome above us, like there was a point in the sky where everything converged. And the colors were all straining—no, more joyful: bounding—toward it.

We kept trying to see it all, but it was so much all around us that this was impossible. So we turned to the snowbank that flanked us, four feet high, and flopped back onto it, lying with our feet in the road. Then we were like kids making snow angels, except that instead of moving we lay rapt. I was trying to articulate it, searching for words. Tom too. I think I said something about dancing.

But here now my heart pounds, because in the time since that night it has come to mean something else. That night with Tom—when I still used to say, I have a brother and not yet, I had a brother. When I still thought things would happen, for him as for me. Thought he’d have a wife, and I’d be at his wedding, would watch him stand in his suit with a grin on his face. That he’d become a dad just as my sisters are mothers, that I’d know his children and would comment on the ways they looked like him. That in middle age I’d be impressed that he still worked out, and we’d talk about travel, places we’d been and places we’d go. And he’d become other things, too, things I couldn’t envision then and can’t guess about now. He’d own a business or be a professor or who can even say. Who can ever say what someone would have become.

But I try to, you know. I try to say, sometimes. To bring him back into this world, if just as a specter, so I can have him again for a moment, as I would have. And maybe that makes it worse. But I can’t help it—I can’t help it. The shock of it is so bright. It wakes me right up. Not in taking me back, but in pulling all the rest forward. So that the night in the snow is happening again, happening here. And I’m stunned right now, with Tom, and we can’t believe it, just can’t believe what we’re seeing. That the darkness can be cut so fully by something that almost isn’t there. That despite the color, the density, there’s still that ethereal glow that we know so well—how the sky looks airbrushed, like a long breath out, turning to frost. 

Marin Sardy is the author of the memoir The Edge of Every Day (2019) and co-creator of the Substack Psychic Telephone. Sardy’s essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, Guernica, Missouri Review, and many other journals. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and three times listed as “notable” in the Best American series. She teaches memoir and personal essay writing for Authors Publish and Writing Workshops.