Reading in bed. Every few minutes, the portable heater clicks back into action. When I plug it in to the wall there are sparks and when I remove the plug there are sparks. When the heater decides it needs more heat, it ticks and sucks electricity from the mains. This affects everything else in the room. A circuit. Everything reacts.

In bed, I register the change because the two bulbs at my bedside shift in intensity when I hear the heater click. I read by the light of a three-bulb lamp but I only screw two bulbs in. I never know how bright a bulb is going to be until I get home and try it. At the store, I don't understand the packaging. Lumens mean nothing to me. Even if the packaging says there are tens of thousands of them, this means nothing to me.

I like knowing that someone has developed a method for measuring the intensity of light, a way of numbering brightness, but I don't want to know what a lumen is, or what it means. Not yet. One day, perhaps, I'll look it up. But not now.

Humanity is blessed by its strangeness. So many people do so many unbelievable things. We're incredibly varied, inscrutably weird. We are divergent pursuits. Thank god we are not all the same.

When I get home and replace a dead bulb with a new one, I enjoy not knowing how bright it's going to be. Dull orange, sharp and white - it's always a surprise. And if you want to witness a miracle, just notice how chaotically thin the filament in a light bulb is before it burns. Watch the current do its work as you switch the circuit on. Blind green holes in your vision if you look directly into it. Something so small and breakable and cheap. A tiny sun.

Most forms are a mystery to me. Sometimes I try, deliberately, not to learn things, in order to retain a child-like wonder. I enjoy miracles, phenomena I can't explain. I have never understood electricity. In school, physics was my weakest subject. I couldn't wrap my head around electrons, or particles, or waves. My best friend once tried to explain to me how a simple closed circuit works. I gave up trying to understand long before he gave up trying to explain it to me. Some people would say this makes me closed-minded, but I like to think of myself as being open to wonder, to the ineffable, the unknown as it appears, or doesn't appear, to me.

I love light. I love the way it plays and bends and warps the world. I love it more than I love so many things. But I can not tell you how it works, or where it comes from. I'm not sure if I love light more than I love people. Sometimes I think I do, but hope I don't.

Another mystery - when the heater clicks in my room, the bulbs at my bedside tick brighter. This doesn't make sense. If the heater is swallowing power from the mains, surely the room should grow dim? I don't understand why it gets brighter, not darker. Perhaps it is a trick of light and sound. Heat and light and surges you can't really see, although you think you can. It's all felt, sensed. None of it can be understood. Look away. It's there.