NIGHT “LIGHTS” Stacey Na
Bergen County Academies
Personal Essay
proven by the extension cord plugged in and capable of providing energy for a standing lamp, desktop lamp, heater, while simultaneously charging a laptop and a phone. And the light bulbs themselves, at the time of initial use, were relatively new. Thus, there was no real reason as to why the light produced by these night lights were constantly dim. It was infuriating. These antique night lights serve no real purpose and, in all honesty, fail to do what an ideal night-light is designed to do. And so, with this sad excuse of a night light plugged into an outlet in my room, my five-year-old self was incapable of taking on whatever the darkness had in store for my imagination and me. Now these dim lights, as provided by these Christmas light knockoffs, are the very definition of hypocrisy. Any night light makes the undying promise to a child to provide the comfort of their presence in the darkest of times. Dim night-lights do not have the power to ward off the cyan monster with purple spots and six countable pointy teeth and bushy eyebrows waiting in the dark to
In some drawer of some storage area in some forgotten corner of my house are the five or six two-faced night lights of my childhood nightmares. A few of these night lights are antique, and as I like to refer to them, “poor Christmas light dupes”: the bulbs of these night lights mirror the intensity and shape of a traditional christmas light. When, as a five-year-old, I’d eagerly plug these sad night lights into an outlet, they projected the most inhospitable yellow. My face scrunched up in disgust and my smile lines became both frown lines and forehead wrinkles. The light from these light bulbs was the color of rotting teeth,1 or maybe decaying wood. The switch to turn on this particular type of night light produces a singular, ominous click. Moving this switch from on to off, or off to on, requires a strange amount of force. Some of these vertical black or brown on and off switches are chipped from heavy wear.2 Besides being terribly ugly and emitting a crummy shade of yellow light, these night-lights are also inexplicably dim. Adequate power was supplied through the outlet, as
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