REFLECTIONS My First Metaphor
By Esperanza Shafer
When I was little, I envisioned people in my mind with halos, soft silver rings that shimmered over every stranger’ s head. I believed in quiet kindness like a second language, in the gentle clatter of coffee cups and calm conversations. I told myself everyone carried a candle inside, little flames fluttering against the dark of the world.
I watched my mother’ s hands, steady as soft rivers, her voice a blanket pulled up to my trembling chin. She smelled like rain and amber when she hugged me, and her heartbeat thudded like distant, steady drums. I wanted to grow into that kind of warmth. A nurse with pockets full of bandages and hope, walking white hallways whispering, you’ re not alone.
I practiced on dolls, wrapping their plastic arms, imagining real tears, real pain, real relief. I saw myself listening for heartbeats the way you listen for secrets in a seashell, ready to find the good in everyone, to trust that every hurt person was once a soft child.
But then there was my father— my first metaphor. A house that looked solid from the street, while inside the walls were cracking and crumbling. His words were sharp, slicing morning into pieces, his mood a sudden storm that shook the windows.
I still hear the pans slam in the kitchen, see my mother’ s shoulders fold in like paper birds. The smell of burnt toast and bitterness stung my nose more than the smoke did. His footsteps down the hallway felt like falling furniture, heavy, hurried, hungry for something.
How do you find a halo on the man who turned our dinner table into a battlefield? How do you see a candle in the same hands that poked, and pushed too hard? I wanted to believe that he was the lighthouse, spinning in circles but never quite reaching us.
firm but gentle touch, to listen for the fragile music of lungs and hearts.
Yet sometimes late at night, I wonder if goodness is just a story I keep stitching together, thread pulled tight through torn fabric. I look at his face in photos, at the way he used to put his arm around me and smile. Was there a candle there once, small and stuttering, before the wind got in?
Maybe seeing the good in everyone doesn’ t mean denying the damage they’ ve done. Maybe it means holding both truths in one tired heart: that maybe he is a boy who never learned to be gentle.
So I will be a nurse, or something like it— a quiet builder of better endings. I will walk into rooms filled with fear and fluorescent light and choose again and again to believe in the trembling goodness of people. I will be the hand that does not point, the voice that does not shout, the house with walls that do not crack.
And if someday a patient looks at me with the same hurt eyes I once wore, I will think of my father, and I will know that even when I cannot find the good in him, I can be the good that was missing. I can be the candle, the lighthouse, proof that the story can change where it ends, like my first broken metaphor.
Metaphor:( a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.)
Bio
Esperanza Shafer is a student at Moore High School with aspirations of becoming a nurse. She was recently accepted into the Health Career Certification program at Moore Norman Technology Center.
As I grew older, I kept tracing my dream of nursing like a vein under thin skin, following its blue line. I still want to stand beside hospital beds, to meet fear with a
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