We need shadows to see the light.

A flame in a sunlit room is invisible. We only know light because something refuses to carry it, and what refuses becomes the very thing that lets us see at all. The shadow is not the enemy of the glow; it is the glow's chaperone, the contrast that lets recognition happen. Without darkness there are no edges, no shapes, no names — only an undifferentiated brightness no eye could parse. The pairs we treat as opposites — grief and joy, absence and presence, self and other — may be running the same quiet errand. What if the parts of life we keep trying to banish are the ones holding the rest into view?