Cecilia Atkins | Sharing Light
DECEMBER 15, 2019
It’s not even eight a.m., the sun still cold and withdrawn in the sky. I carry two cups of coffee to the house on the corner, and when Cecilia emerges, flitting down the steps, I offer her the one in my right hand, lightened with a dash of oat milk.
Good morning, I say, and she responds, Hello. I am so tired. Yet as we head down the sidewalk toward the hiking path, she paces me, her steps quick and assured. Cecilia is one of the few people I know who walks faster than I do, despite a good three inches in height difference. (She’s shorter but regularly insists that we are the same size.) When I first met her, I found her intimidating, labeling her as one of those individuals who moves rapidly and efficiently through life. While these past two years of friendship have affirmed that view, I have also come to know and love her through the quieter moments that we have spent together: making sloppy quesadillas after a night out, or walking her dog along the windy beaches of San Francisco, or—most recently—our morning dish hikes with coffee in hand, talking and laughing in the hours between the sunrise and the day.
It is a treasure to have these experiences with Cecilia, and I believe she feels much the same way. Growing up under parents who left their respective countries, and having been born in London herself, she has never much bought into the rather American idea that it is better to be special, to be stand-out. A part of this, she tells me, is that in her household, there was always a certain critical lens applied to American culture, which I appreciated. But more fundamentally, she believes the goal isn’t to have something that nobody else has. Because it’s a beautiful thing to have something that many others have, and to share that with them.
With her, I have perhaps shared too much—every single aspect of my lunch on a given day, or the intimate details of my sometimes-questionable music taste. At the same time, we have both confronted the deeply personal experience of growing up with a language that we almost know; that we speak but cannot command. She tells me that Japanese has always been less a tool than an emotion, that she has always felt strange trying to study it in an academic setting. I am reminded of my own relationship with Korea, with Korean. The structure of the language is embedded in my brain, but when I try to form the words, they emerge disjointed and young—a kindergartener adopting the voice of a twenty-one-year-old.
I tell her this, and she laughs. The way I describe my Japanese is that I speak like a very intelligent fifth grader, with quite lofty aspirations but quite limited. Maybe even a third grader on a bad day.
But Cecilia’s childhood in a multilingual household has rooted in her a rich and grounding family identity. With her parents and brother, she shares a wry sense of humor, a fierce independent streak, and a passion for history. It’s always been a feature of our upbringing—the importance of who we are through where we come from. She finds solace in the ability to bridge past and present. And in constantly drawing these connections through time, she seldom talks in a straight line. It’s hard for me to create some kind of linear sense of who I am and what I’ve done, because I feel like a lot of my life revolves around my perspective and my passions. I don’t feel like a linear narrative captures that for me.
Rather, it is the people around her and the motivations within her that spiral and circle, creating the space that she inhabits, defining Cecilia for who she is: ever-shifting, ever-fluid. She relishes the constant potential for change that she perceives in her friends. Friendship is a wonderful thing in the sense that, if it’s a truly deep and honest friendship, it’s so expansive, so amorphous. There’s no rigid lane for you to run in; there’s no true beginning, middle, and end. It’s this ongoing shared experience in which you can learn so much.
She tells me that within each of her friends, she pictures a little orb, a solid and sustaining life force that drives them, whether they know who they are or not. She believes that every one of her friends has a sincere integrity—a goodness—in them. I wonder if she knows how much of that sincerity, that goodness, she gives to others. How much she has given to me.
Because despite my initial impressions of her, I have learned that Cecilia glows from the inside out. That the little light inside of her burns brightly, touching everyone around her with its warmth.
She is, for example, the first and perhaps only person who has ever told me that she draws motivation from the question of justice, the question of humanity. She admits that it is easy to sneer at. But, she explains, everyone wants to feel seen and everyone wants to feel understood, and I want to be able to give that to people. I think in a truly just world, everyone would have that opportunity. In the same way that she views her own life in a cyclical manner, she sees cycles of injustice that exist and will continue to exist unless she takes action to throw them off. I have a duty to lift others up.
In an ideal world, Cecilia would be a lawyer and a poet. I think there are many ways to move change, and I really am interested in doing that through the law. This fulfillment of a larger, systemic goal is accompanied by a smaller and much more personal endeavor: that of creation. Sometimes, at Stanford, creativity is really stifled. So much of what we’re in is not about the process but about the result. And as a result, she has to take advantage of the small moments that spark a simple image, a line of poetry, in her mind.
On our walk, she looks up at the clouds, rippling grey and gorgeous across the sky. It looks like when you duck under a wave as it’s crashing.
A snippet of a thought. A laugh, a dry remark, a comfortable silence. It’s the little things. A shared plate of fries, an exhausted walk home after a long night in the library. Crosswords at the kitchen table. Ten miles of trails under the spring sun. It may be the little things, yes, but for me they become so much bigger, taking on a new life—circling and circling until they touch upon everything about Cecilia that I love, every second in her company that brings me such peace and happiness.
We start up the final, steepest hill of our hike together—the heat of the coffee seeping through the disposable cup, the cardboard sleeve wrapped around it—our footsteps in tandem, a familiar rhythm—our breaths, foggy, the first hint of warmth in the crisp morning air.
Photo courtesy of Cecilia Atkins
