Everybody loves sunsets.
This is, in fact, true. Never will you find a nay-sayer―between sunsets on beaches, sunsets over snow, and sunsets even from a cramped car, they're a universally-percieved sight of natural beauty. Sunsets are for first kisses, capping off a long, fulfilling day, or kicking off a night of things that can only really happen in the dark. If you ask a person if they would like to go watch the sun set from some comfortable location, they will almost always oblige. Bunnies, rainbows, sunsets, and love.
But what goes up must come down, which means the day is dawning on another realm, all of it a part of the beautiful balance that is nature. See, sunsets are nice. But it's predecessor, in my opinion, really holds the power.
Sunrises are saved for the more grandoise. I've seen a lot of sunsets, and they've all been nice and lovey-dovey and pretty, and I can't take away from that. But every sunrise I've watched (and I'm certain I can recall them all) has been symbolic of something ending, something beginning, something special. I don't mean just waiting at the bus stop on a goddamn early school day, no, that's just the opposite, it's the norm, it's godawful. But when you really sit and watch the sun rear its perfectly-spherical, luminous head, it sinks in.
Perhaps its this time of year, and being home that's giving me a bad case of nostalgia. I vividly remember the night of my grad―three years ago next week. I'll refuse to gloss over and say that a perfect night was had by all, because that was far from the fact. I divided my night jigging to Cyndi Lauper, and later, singing love songs to a toilet bowl at the Agricom. We couldn't decided on the after-grad destination, and spent the latter part of the eve peeing in Boston Pizza's, and miscommunicating with a limo driver. When we finally returned home, we rolled down the tinted windows and stepped out with bloody, blistered feet and bam!, there was the sun, saying hello, last night is over, you are done. I remember looking around at my friends and playing some reality-t.v. like game show―who, in one year, five years, will make the cut of the Real World, which friends will really "keep in touch" like they say they will (for the record, from that car ride, three). I remember watching the sun rise from an untouched acerage, and thinking of beginnings, and endings, and not much else. A Night to Remember, but that was just the grad's theme. A whole different world to wake up to, that's what it really meant to me on that late-late-night, that too-early-morning.
Then, another time.
Last year in the gorgeous Gorge in Washington State, with two of my best friends from home, and one new friend, watched the sun rise as we packed up our campsite after a long, aptly-titled Memorial Day weekend. A weekend ending with goodbyes to places, to our campsite and our tent that we didn't once sleep in, to all the music played on a stage framed by nothing but blown-wide-open skies. We'd soon head in the car home together, and then I would solitarily head away by myself to my new home, my first summer away. I wondered what it would be like to spend it without the friends I'd had forever.
Last night, well, by now, two nights ago, I drove an old friend with a past home after a long night out. We reminisced, and as that familiar luminous body rose, I remembered the last time we'd driven this road. The last time, it was when two people became something more than friends. We'd climbed a bridge and conquered it, singing from the top to no one who'd hear that it was ours, that we were a "we." The other night seemed the same. We drove around familiar circles, and when dawn struck we were left to wonder if that was all really in the past, or if the past was playing into the present―into the now, into the new. It all seemed too recent, too real. As the car door shut and I was left alone in what was by now near to broad daylight, I drove home in dead silence, music not too crowd my wandering mind.
What has happenned, what is to come... real sunrises mean beginnings, endings, but nothing in between.
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