Grays and Goldens

I now love the sea at dusk for a different reason.

I used to like it for the sunset, like everybody else, but one afternoon, lacking a reason to hurry home, I sat a little bit longer, and I discovered that the colors of the sea after sunset are more beautiful--when the sky is quieting down from its explosion of reds and yellows.

The sea gives up its blues and greens then, and becomes so many kinds of gray. Up in the sky, there are usually muted streaks of goldens—nothing extravagant. The grandeur of the sunset has subsided, and the sky and the sea give in to a denouement. This denouement is like a sigh, as if both the sea and sky are spent from all the work required in creating such a spectacle of colors that must accompany the setting of the sun.

From the left, what I come here to watch begins without haste. The goldens burn a little a duller, and the grays from the sea meet those from the sky, wiping away the horizon.

I come to the beach now to watch this disappearance.

Without the horizon, there is no longer a divide. It seems to me that the earth and the heavens continue into each other, as if we could reach the heavens if we walked far enough; as if all the people we have lost, who are there on the other side, could cross and come back to us.

Are they looking, too? Are they sitting down, perhaps, on their side of the shore, waiting out the horizon as well, so that they may also feel us near?

And always, as if my soul remembers an ancient instruction, I look up towards my left—towards the memory of a left hand that could not move, towards the memory of another left hand that endeavored to make up for what the other could not do. I have lost both of them now. I have lost, too, the memory of the last time I had stolen into either of those hands for their comfort.

When did I decide that the weight of my hand into theirs was a burden I could spare them? Why was it never revealed to me that by withholding my need for their hand, I was denying them a pleasure? 

Yes, the disappearing always starts in the left. And right up ahead always lies the last piece of horizon to disappear. Soon, the sky and the sea will be seamless. The new singular vastness will be two shades paler than night, and when the wind is right, it will be tranquil, save for the foam that would rise up and roll towards the shore.

The depth that this vastness would possess will be breathtaking. From where I sit on the shore, it will be as if I'd be looking right into infinity, and it will feel as if the reckoning of this unimaginable space/time could only be done right there and right then.

It is very, very far, where they are, isn’t it? And forever is a very, very long time.


Perhaps, sitting there on the shore at dusk, across the immense gray vastness, is the closest I will ever get to them.

This infinity separates us.

But then the horizon disappears, and for that little while, it is all the distance that I need.