It was a quiet sky. The rages of purple, orange and gold that had slashed the sky just moments before were now gone. Disappeared like a breath of cloud into the last rays. The sun had long gone. I stood for a while watching the sun. He had been oppressive today. Harsh, unrelenting with a fierce wrenching swagger to his usual moodiness. I didn’t like the sun. Not since that day when he tore the insides of my thoughts and echoed his laughter to the skies. It was so long ago. All so long ago.
We were alone then. Just me and the sun. I thought I loved him. How intensely we love. How intensely we hate. How intensely we hallucinate in the belief that both exist. Every day was a greeting to the sky. Blue, beckoning oceans of warmth that soaked through the deliciousness of being in love. He was kinder then, warm without being suffocating. Below us the universe stretched his arms wide. We embraced it. Moved through the vast swathes of a glorious viviscience. There was so much to see! So many worlds to clasp. We travelled far, more than all the years you can count. My sun was my guardian at that time, guiding me through the harsher climes when I gasped for breath, and struggled to see. We thought we knew each other and knew the paths our lives would take. “Imagine,” he would say, beckoning in the golden light. “Imagine, we are so young, and so much to live.” “I know,” I smiled, my pale arms fading in his glow. “We have only our imagination as our life,” I said. He looked at me for a moment, not understanding, and to tell you the truth, neither did I. Perhaps it changed at that moment. Or perhaps it didn’t. I will never know. But we were consumed by a different pain – the pain of knowing that we would never know each other. Live each other. Imagine. Imagine. Imagination was all our life. It began with clouds of gentle doubt, each of us moving away and apart as we grappled with our thoughts, different and ebbing, flowing into different directions. And then it just sutured wide, a split into a chasm of chaos.
I began to wane. Each turn of the sky brought me a different color, a new mood. I didn’t know I was changing. I didn’t know if I even liked the change. All I knew was that every day I lost a piece of myself. My sun too didn’t remain the same. Unlike me, though the sameness was his difference. What I lost he gained. He turned his bitterness into a pulverizing passion, a fire that quenched his thirst to be the most ‘beautiful one out there.’ His words, not mine. The passion burned. He was truly beautiful. But the old sky turned her clouds away from him. “He scalds my kids,” she complained. I begged him. Pleaded, and entreated him to retreat. Cast away that anger. To rule the world and not ruin. But he didn’t. “Ruin is in ourselves anyway,” he would say with a smile that made me think of the old days when we believed in running the world, in rejoicing, in rewards that came that need not ever be bought. We melted away. How you might ask? What happened exactly you may want to know? I never knew. We just did. I could no longer bear the fire, staunch the anger. For a while, I moved like a shadow in his wake. But that angered him. “Alone. Alone, you understand?”he would mock, and I would nod, I understood. We needed to be alone to recognize that we were always alone.
That was all so long ago. Here I stand. I met a beautiful friend. One who comforted my loss, and was gentle always. I stand awed in her shadow, miserable to speak most of the time yet unable to leave the silent words unsaid. My sun? We are apart now. Too far to speak, too little to say if we do. But there he stands…perhaps more than me, the only one who life was not an imagination. The sky hopes we meet again. As I, wait to rise, watching the blue ink spread across the sky, I wonder if we ever did.
