Sunset

Today, I found myself with an hour of time before I needed to accomplish anything. At that point, I wandered around and found myself outside of a particular door, perhaps without so much as meaning to, and looking at the sun go down. Let me just begin by saying that the sunset was gorgeous. It was magnificent. When I first looked at the sky, I could only begin to see the sun peering down through a layer of clouds. As I watched further, it crawled out into the clear mist below the clouds and nearly blinded me for nearly ten minutes. Then it finally dipped behind the line of trees and disappeared beneath the horizon, leaving me in darkness and cold at last. This took all of twenty minutes, but the thoughts I encountered throughout that period of time exceeded any that I could have imagined possible in such a short span.

It was outside of that door, eight months ago, that I stood with my ex, looking toward the sunset, watching the golden orb dip behind that same line of trees. The difference is that it was warm then, and I could feel the soft and fragrant breeze on my face, and I felt the warmth of an arm around my shoulders. It was such a changed experience today from what it had been then...I was so naive then, so convinced of the virtue of the person who stood at my side. And now, now I was in a cloud of sorrow, an isolated island of bitter reality. It wasn't merely the cold wind blasting my face, nor the harsh reflections of fading light on the icy earth...it was a state of mind.

In the space of the past year, from before that relationship to where I am now, I have lost so much. And it is not a matter of obvious innocence or the lack of certain experiences. I have lost much faith in humanity, I have lost trust for people, and I have utterly lost any desire to ever look on someone as I once looked on the person beside me that day. So here I am, eight months later, in a stuffy room with the heat blasting to keep the bitter cold of the outside air away from my face, remembering the feel of that warm, blessed breeze, still trying to understand just what has happened since then. It was twenty minutes. It was a sunset. But the blur of memories and emotions that it evoked was far more than I was prepared for, and I spent the rest of my day, up through this moment, trying to understand it, to possibly come to terms with it, or at the very least, to fully accept it. And I don't know that I have.