// The longest sunset
On my way back to Canada, the sun got stuck at the horizon, and the colors didn’t want to die. This was the longest sunset I had ever seen. It went on for 6 hours. After a while, I got a headache. This sunset was too much; this sunset felt like the passing of my father.
// I saw the end approaching, the sky became softer, and the night prepared itself to sprawl out. The sinking sun was so bright it hurt my eyes, yet I couldn’t look away. I had to be still and witness the clash of day and night, of life and death. I couldn’t help but stare into the light, until I felt the sun duplicating in my mind’s eye, leaving a brand at the back of my optic nerves. I couldn’t help but sit at my father’s bed and watch the milky dimming in his iris, count the seconds between his breaths, and feel his spirit’s attempts to crush the cage. It was beautiful.
// After one hour, I got used to the intensity of this sunset. It became a part of the scenery. It felt natural to wake up every morning and drive to the rehabilitation center where my dad would never rehabilitate. I got used to his paper skin, the hyperextension of silence caught in his lungs, and the gratitude that kept digging visceral cavities into the fibers of my heart. It became a part of the scenery.
// After two hours, the magic started to stumble. I looked around and saw that most people had closed their windows shades and immersed themselves in a movie. It made me angry. How could they not (want to) see what was happening outside? How could they not (want to) be a witness? How could they just look away so easily? When the magic dropped to the gray floor, and the fading was integrated into my landscape, I looked around and saw all those family members that were absent, that went about their days because they had already said goodbye. It made me angry. How could they not (want to) see what was happening inside? How could they not (want to) be a witness? How could they just walk away so easily?
// After three hours, I started feeling tired. I still couldn’t look away. The lines of orange and yellow were penetrating my patience, and I realized that I was mostly angry at myself for not being able to walk away. Why am I like this? Why do I have to stay in these liminal realms with no entry and no exit? Why do I feel like I HAVE to do this? I grappled with my knowing and cursed my soul for sending me down this path. Then, I turned towards the window, gave up resistance, and surrendered. In this dying landscape, this was my role to live. I took my father’s hand in mine. The headache dissolved.
// After four hours, I was co-existing with the sunset. I started writing, and when I looked up, the sunset was still there. I started reading, and when I looked up, my father was still there. There was an easiness about it, that had shed from the weight. We were humming melodies together, I, myself, in a canon with death and life, and my father’s silence created the rhythm. It was his song. And I knew I had to sing it until the very end. I knew my vocal cords could stretch until the very end.
// After five hours, the sunset was still there, and it started to weigh heavy on my limbs. The days had stretched too far. It was unbearable. I found myself longing for the end, I wanted it to be over, I wanted to be able to leave. Nobody can hold such an amount of raw beauty, I thought. Maybe we all love sunsets so much because they are so short-lived. Or short-died, for that matter. And when the burning ball submits to the darkness, it feels like redemption. We said goodbye to the day, and greeted the night, the changing of the guard is complete and we can switch roles. It is hard to be a witness of twilight. Especially then when the magic topples and when the vocal cords have reached the limits of their capacity to hold a tone. It became so exhausting to even exist in that realm. I witnessed the dying of my father, and I didn’t know what life was, anymore.
// After six hours, I gathered my presence and pressed it against the window. I did apply force. I wanted myself to stick, scraping energies and resources and reserves. I hurried after parts of myself and dragged them back to where it all began. My birth. I am because my father was. I wanted to stay closer as he was moving further. I felt the last hour approaching, the sun had sunk, and so had his face. The colors softened, his gaze, his breath, only a flapping, a further fading of the form. And I suddenly understood the necessity and the power of presence in its widest extension. And I thought - time will never be the same.
The seventh hour, the seventh day
// After one week, I woke up, and my father didn’t. I looked outside the window to check, and it was all dark. The sunset had died, and I had missed the last stroke, the last breath. A bittersweet taste of disappointment swept over my belly before I felt utter relief and profound peace. It all made sense, in an odd and twisted way. I understood that the significance had laid in the act of staying, not in the act of leaving. My father and the sunset, they were both resisting the change long enough for the horizon to turn into a path that could be walked. My father and the sunset, they left the most colorful imprints in their fading and played the loudest melody in their silence. My father and the sunset - they both died at that moment I stopped holding on to time.
My father and the sunset.
