Although I’ve dreamt of seeing the northern lights since I was thirteen, I become especially obsessed with them after my second consecutive miscarriage. It’s just before Christmas, on one of the darkest days of the year, and I lie in bed and will myself to sleep, hoping to hibernate until the days lengthen. When sleep does come, it’s not the dreamless lapse of consciousness I pray for. Instead, I dream of the Aurora, an emerald snake winding across the darkness of my mind. In my dream, there is no landscape, no earth beneath the sky, only light and the velvet black beyond it.
That spring, I am pregnant again. This time, there is no flutter of excitement when I see the double lines on the test stick, no squeal of delight. I feel only dread for what’s to come. And by midsummer, my daughter’s heartbeat has stilled. For the third time in less than a year, I have carried, and then miscarried.
Days later, I move from Louisiana to Montana, where my husband has accepted a new job. We don’t know anyone in Montana, nor have we even visited our new town before. I’m unemployed and still bleeding, so I spend those first few weeks in bed again, eating only Top Ramen and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Before my losses, I felt like a full human. Now, my body feels incomprehensibly empty, incomplete. When I wake, I drape my hand across my belly and listen for an echo. I wonder if the doctor has mistakenly removed other critical organs like a spleen or pancreas, because I am certain of my own cavernous darkness.
Jacob comes home from work one day and tells me that the aurora may be visible from our new town within the next week or so. At the news, I am reanimated, jolted from my trance. I ask everyone I meet—mostly landlords of apartments we’re touring—if they’ve seen the Aurora before. “Just once,” a couple people tell me. And then their eyes cloud with something somber and reverent.
“I saw them when I was driving home in the middle of the night,” someone says. “I pulled the car over. I thought I was hallucinating.”
“I saw them when I was camping one summer. We were going to bed, and I woke the kids to watch.”
This is the part of the story when both the teller and the listener stop, basking in the imagined glow of the lights. While each story varies, this moment remains the same from one encounter to the other. When witnessing light, we all stop and marvel.
Jacob and I drive up into the rocky plateau surrounding town, then wander further along the highway until the lights of homes vanish. Still unfamiliar with the geography of the town, we’re unsure where to spot the aurora. The road before us is vast and bare, full of endless stretches of grass and of speckled horses nibbling each other’s ears. The openness of the landscape is both lonely and invigorating. It’s August, and days are painfully long, the cloudless bank of sky cloyingly blue. We’ve come too early and must wait for the sun to slip beneath the horizon.
We stop on the side of the road and sit on the hood of the car, feeling it tick with heat. Jacob and I are quiet as we wait, faces upturned. Trucks zoom along the highway, stirring the summer air as they speed past.
“Do you think you could be happy without children?” I ask.
“Of course,” Jacob says softly. “Could you?”
“I don’t know.”
He reaches to wipe a tear off my cheek, then offers me a clean tissue from the unending supply hidden in the pockets of his jeans. He knows how to navigate this familiar path. I’ve been crying for weeks. Things that shouldn’t be significant set me off: Jacob asking me what I did that day, the taste of foods I craved while pregnant, a trip to the county fair. I tell myself that it’s just my hormones seesawing, that the weeping will stop when my normal menstrual cycle returns.
Stretched out on the car’s hood, I think suddenly of Vasilisa the Beautiful, one of my favorite fairytales. It’s a Russian story about a grieving girl who must venture alone into the winter woods to bring light back to her home. Vasilisa, still reeling from the death of her mother, endures impossible trials and tasks from the witch of the wood, Baba Yaga, before returning home. Her prize is a blazing skull plucked from Baba Yaga’s fencepost, flickering with the fire of renewal, the promise of a spring to come.
I love this story, if only for that one image of Vasilisa triumphantly returning from her battle with darkness, ushering the return of light. A framed copy of the illustration hangs in my bedroom. In it, Vasilisa brandishes her skull lantern as a weapon and armor both, the very emblem of the grief she’s carried.
Though we drive and stop at several locations that August evening, we can’t catch the aurora. The next day, I scroll through images of green skies in the local paper, wondering where we went wrong.
In fairytales and in doctors’ offices, three is a magic number. Most doctors won’t agree to run tests on a patient until she’s suffered three consecutive pregnancy losses. The first two, they promise, are simply bad luck. “It’s a good sign you conceive so easily,” they say, smiling stupidly. The third loss proves the pattern to be a rule instead of an exception. At three, my transformation from fertile to infertile, from hopeful mother to bereaving mother, is complete.
An MRI of my uterus reveals a secret mutation: bisecting my empty womb is a ridge of bloodless flesh, a cold crest where no embryo can safely implant. It’s hard to visualize with an MRI, especially for someone unfamiliar with the complexities of anatomy. All I see is a shadow lodged in my pelvis, a current of darkness running through me where none should be. “An uncommon birth defect,” the doctor explains. But I know better. It’s proof, I’m sure, that where I should be springtime, I am winter. Where I should be life-giving, I am death.
The surgery is scheduled, of course, for Halloween. The doctor declares my procedure a success. When we do the post-op imagery, she looks impressed with herself as she announces that my uterus is now perfect. But it’s not, I want to tell her, breathing through the pain of the catheter in my cervix. I am still full of darkness. I can feel it.
I dream I become pregnant again. When I have my first ultrasound, the technician points to the printed photo: “Here’s your baby,” she beams, “and here are all your dead babies.” And sure enough, there they are, lined up in order of size like little nesting dolls. I insist that she’s wrong, that those babies were removed from my body. But the technician only smiles and points to the shadows bobbing inside me.
I’m right. The doctors run more tests. They test things I never knew to look for, and I fail test after test. There are many ways to be infertile, and I seem to possess every possible way. I have always suspected that I was wrong in some way, that my very nature was flawed. Now, there is irrefutable proof. My genetic code is so corrupt, it won’t allow itself to be copied.
The doctor tells me I have a high likelihood of having more miscarriages if I don’t pursue IVF, and also, I am not a good candidate for IVF. I am welcome to fly to another state to visit a clinic that is more equipped to deal with challenging cases like mine.
My first winter in Montana is longer and colder than any I’ve known. Here, winter isn’t a season, but a world. An arctic storm arrives just before Christmas, and the temperature drops to 25 below zero. I layer myself as heavily as possible and wrap a scarf around my face before walking to the gym. As I push against the wind, I pretend I am Vasilisa, tearing herself from the warmth of her potbelly stove to set out into the wilderness alone. It’s her jealous stepsisters who extinguish the fire and send her on her quest, certain Vasilisa won’t survive the frigid forest. But Vasilisa has grown impervious to the darkness surrounding her because she’s been trapped for years in her own internal forest—in the expansive loneliness of mourning. I wonder if a part of her feels relief at being alone in the black woods, finally able to succumb to the landscape of grief.
And yet, even in 25 below, when the sun sets at 4 p.m. and the world is cast in a blue both melancholy and dizzying, this winter is not without light. I catch glimpses from the corners of my eyes: the streetlights reflected in the crystals paving the ground, the silver flutter of pigeons, the dusting of snowflakes. The light is hidden, as if willing me to chase it.
At the gym, I take a yoga class. Since my last loss, my hips and lower back have ached almost unceasingly. I spend hours lying on a heating pad, my knees curled to my chest. I’ve read that trauma can be stored in the body. How strange to have a specific place to point to, a shelf on which to store my grief. Yoga yelps with the muscle aches.
When we lie in shavasana, the yoga teacher instructs us to place one hand on our hearts and one on our bellies. I feel my pulse echoing in the empty chamber of my womb, an unlit mansion. Tears well up, hot and urgent beneath my eyelids. These days, I cry almost every time I work out. Until recently, I have never known absence to have a weight or texture. Now, it’s as if a bank of darkness lives in my muscles, and when I sweat, it seeps out of me. During the stillness of shavasana, I feel that lack take shape and press its edges against my own. Somehow, it’s a little easier to face it in a room full of strangers than in my lonely apartment. If I’m alone for too long, it might swallow me entirely.
Several times that winter, I seek out the aurora. Periodically, I read that it might be visible from Montana. Tonight a solar flare is expected, though these things are hard to predict. Because the aurora is best seen between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., Jacob is sometimes too tired to join me, but tonight he agrees. I love our late-night drives. I like pretending we’re united on a quest, nomads hovering on the fringes of towns, happiest with nothing but a knapsack. Outside the immediate limits of our suburb, only a few houses and barns sprinkle the landscape. The night stretches above and below us, ripe with uncertainty. Ranch cats and racoons dart across the unlit roads, their eyes twin planets in the headlights. When I was a little girl, I felt a deep terror of the dark. As soon as my parents turned off the light and left the room, I could feel the darkness expand and become animated, growing teeth and scales and talons. “Your room is exactly the same in the dark as it is in the light,” my mom used to say. As a child, I didn’t yet understand the true terror of the dark: not the known monsters lurking outside, but the unknown potential within.
When I grew into a teenager, I learned to love the night for the first time. Sometimes I sat vigil until dawn, listening to music or journaling. I crept through the house when it was still, then slipped outside to stand under the streetlight, trying to see my childhood home from the eyes of a stranger. At night, I felt I could run away and go anywhere, become anyone. At that age, an unseen future felt remarkably like power.
Now, in search of the aurora, I’m suddenly overwhelmed by that adolescent limitless. For a fleeting moment, the darkness feels full of possibility and even hope, an escape rather than a nightmare. But in truth, it’s the same darkness that filled my childhood bedroom or hovered beneath my eyes during shavasana. The darkness hasn’t changed, only I have.
Some part of me believes that if I want the northern lights badly enough, I can make them appear. But the world is full of unfulfilled wanting. During the years before my pregnancies, I built my future around the plan of children. Now, my future is both empty and full of possibility, untethered by the weightlessness of not knowing. Maybe if I knew for sure that I will never be a parent, I could begin to grieve that desire, and eventually move on. But my whole life exists in the what if, teetering in a liminal space. The uncertainty that once ignited me when I was young now paralyzes me.
I want to pull over on the side of a dark road to wait for the lights, but Jacob says it’s not safe. We drive wordlessly until I find a spot, but it’s too close to the city lights, and besides, there is a thin layer of snow descending, the sky too swirled with clouds to preview any celestial activity. I park anyway, and we sit in silence while I cry.
“Is this really just about the northern lights,” he asks, confounded, “or is it something else?”
I shake my head, unable to articulate it. “I just,” I hiccup, wiping my nose. “I just really need a little light right now.”
We drive home and go to bed. I lay sleepless beside him for a long time, staring into the shadowy apartment, into the corners I can’t quite see.
There is one main highway that traverses Western Montana, and every time we drive it, we pass signs for a cave in a state park. It’s only open during the summer, so when Memorial Day arrives, we drive the few hours for a tour.
Our guide must have been a theater kid; at one point he starts doing voices, and I half expect him to shuffle into the shadows for a quick costume change. He leads us through the chasm, pointing silently to the bats hanging in clusters from the ceiling like bunches of rotten bananas. It’s cool and damp within the caves, and the minerals leave a glossy sheen of sediment on the walls, like thousands of candles melted atop one another. Slowly, we descend chamber by chamber, ducking and scooting and crawling to avoid the stalactites crowning the ceiling. I have the sensation of being digested by a great beast, like Jonah being swallowed by the whale.
When we are deep within the heart of the cavern, our guide turns off the battery-powered lights lining our path. He asks us all to turn off our phones, and a little boy screams with fright. After comforting the boy, the guide explains that this is one of the only forms of pure natural darkness found on earth. “The only other place this dark is the bottom of the ocean, and most people will never see that. Any other darkness you find is manmade.”
He tells a story about a man who got trapped in the caves while carving the stairway within them. It wasn’t until the rescuers found him that the man realized he had hallucinated this very scene six or seven times already. In the dark, the eyes play tricks, desperately grasping at shapes to discern reality. The mind will go to extremes to avoid the discomfort of the self, of the unknown.
The man, our guide informs us, was never the same. For the rest of his life, he continued to see hallucinations, the ghostly lights of the caves following him long after he emerged. And yet, when the trail was finished and the caves opened to visitors, he immediately signed up for a tour, venturing back into the subterranean landscape of his nightmares.
After our tour, I continue to think about this man, wondering why he’d seek out darkness after it nearly killed him. The guide himself pointed to this phenomenon when he mentioned the spaces of manmade darkness like sensory deprivation tanks or even, on a smaller scale, shavasana. Evidently, there is a hunger within us that only darkness can satisfy. Why else would I pay money to go on a cave tour, waiting for the inevitable moment when the guide would turn off the lights and leave me briefly floating through nothingness, detached from shapes or light or even the sight of my own body? In fact, this corporeal freedom was what I most longed for, a preview of oblivion small enough to comprehend. I wonder if this darkness engulfed my babies as they drifted through the murky soup of becoming. Maybe I crave darkness because I recognize it, because some part of me still remembers the terrifying and lonely journey into existence.
After her mother’s death, Vasilisa is terrified of the dark. Her mother leaves her with a magical doll who tells her, “Grief is worst at night. Lie down, shut thine eyes, comfort thyself and go to sleep. The morning is wiser than the evening.” The doll is right; Vasilisa feels better in the morning. Yet with every morning comes the eventuality of night, and with it, all the same ghosts. I suppose that’s simply the nature of grief. It can’t be vanquished, only temporarily tucked away. Because it’s too big to feel all at once, the sun and moon gift us with cycles. And though this story has a happy ending—Vasilisa marries the czar, of course, and never has to live without fire again—I wonder about the unwritten epilogue. Years after her adventure in the woods, Vasilisa might fall asleep before the hearth, safe and warm beneath the down bedding of royalty, and dream of what she saw—or thought she saw—during her nocturnal wandering. I wonder if other people could see it on her, this stain of darkness, a translucent veil blurring her features. Maybe these scars were what attracted the czar to her, a woman well acquainted with the intimacies of death. If Vasilisa is to become a mother herself, she’ll need to face that hooded figure again and again with every labor.
The next time I search for the aurora, I go alone. Jacob bids me good luck from the comfort of bed, and I set out like a heroine off to seek the wisdom of a witch. I drive to a park on the outskirts of town, far enough to feel distant, but close enough to feel safe. As I drive, I fiddle with the radio and find a classic rock station that plays all my favorite hits. I smile and sing along, turning the volume too loud. Mine is the only car in the lot. I stay for an hour or so, enjoying the solitude. When I stop resisting it, there is a certain peace that comes with night. Finally, it’s time to admit defeat and return home. But this, I decide, is the perfect spot, the one I’ll return to next time, or the time after, or whenever it is I manage to catch the northern lights.
When New Year’s comes, I’m eager to make resolutions. Normally I hate this holiday, which comes during a season of mourning, not renewal. But this year I am uncharacteristically optimistic, even grateful for the opportunity to start again.
This year, I tell myself, I will not focus on baby-making. This year, I will do things just for me, things that offer no utility, only joy.
I start a skin care routine. I open a new journal. I sign up for dance classes. I make an account on Bumble BFF to make friends. In my profile, after a short list of my interests, I write, my life goal is to see the northern lights.
Strangely enough, this is what leads me to them. It’s as if, by declaring my dream on the internet, I am willing it to be. Part prayer, part spell, I invoke some kind of magic, though I don’t yet know it.
A woman I’ve befriended through the app texts me one afternoon. If you haven’t already heard, the northern lights are supposed to be visible tonight! After a quick Google, I’m flooded with articles on the approaching solar storm. It’s Friday night, and Jacob cheerfully complies.
“I think tonight might be the night,” I tell him as we lock the door.
“I think it might be,” he agrees.
When we arrive at the park, the lot is full. A man stands peering into a telescope, which is pointed skyward. There is a band of indigo stretched across the navy sky, arching from east to west. It looks nothing like the pictures.
“Excuse me,” Jacob asks the man with the scope. “Is that the northern lights?”
The man nods once, his face puckered with a touch of derision. Yeah duh, he seems to indicate.
We walk further into the dark until we’re far away from the parking lot and the other gazers. Slowly, the light in the sky shifts and warps. Right in the center, directly above us, a diamond of light pulsates. Its brindled pattern reminds me of the tie-dye t-shirts I made at summer camp as a kid. Little by little, the diamond expands, breathing in and out as the indigo color drenches the sky. It’s as if I’m standing beneath a clear umbrella and someone has cracked an egg on the top, letting its yolk drip slowly down.
“This is it!” I exclaim, smacking Jacob’s arm. I dance around him, squealing, my eyes filling with tears.
He is slack-jawed, his head thrown back and his eyes large. “Wow!” he says again and again. Then he’ll point, grabbing my shoulder to say, “look!”
I am looking, but looking is almost not enough. I want to drink it in, to consume it, to encode it in my dark, jumbled DNA. Because I’d only ever seen pictures of it, I thought the aurora was a static, stationary phenomenon. But this event, like all of nature’s glories, is living and moving. Every time I turn, I notice a new shade of green or purple, a new corner of the sky feverishly illuminated. When I stare at one spot for long enough, I see long ribbons of light unfurl like party decorations, coiling and uncoiling their opalescent strands. At times, the lights look like fingers, like shadow puppets cast on a wall. Other times they look feathery or seem to pool and drip like water flowing down a stalagmite. Their slow undulations remind me of the reflections made by the ocean when it’s calm. The aurora is beautiful, yes, but it is also wild and throbbing and nothing like what I imagined it to be. Taking a photo of the aurora would be like cupping a flowing river in my hands and declaring that I’d captured it.
I think of the place in my lower back where I keep my grief, and the band of darkness in my uterus that has been extracted but not removed. If it is true that I can store darkness in my body, maybe it is also true that I can sow light within it. I want to hold every dazzling candle of the aurora in my memory, but I know even as I witness it that I cannot. Instead, I can only hope that even when the images fade from my mind, my body will remember this phenomenon, will recognize those glittering embers as it would know its own pulse. After feasting upon the aurora, I hope that I can fold the recesses of my organs into many tiny mirrors, that in my very marrow and atoms, I can learn to generate my own light. The next time I’m cast out into the dark woods, I hope I will know how to temper my own wild cosmos, how to balance the pockets of blackness with the eddies of silver, how to marvel at both.
After all, there is no cure or prevention for darkness. In my framed illustration of Vasilisa, the corners still billow with shadows pressing in on her. Though she’s holding the flaming skull, the darkness is not gone, only waiting for its cyclical return.
But this is what calls to me most about Vasilisa’s journey. When she ventures into the forest, she has no guarantee of finding light. There are a hundred ways she might die before her quest is complete. Yet she goes anyway, and to me, that is her greatest triumph: not her final discovery of light, but her willingness to immerse herself in darkness for the chance to glimpse it.
