When The Sun Glares
To Addie, you’re lucky you’re like the sun and those who know you are lucky to know your light.
-Nora
I’m running on too much coffee and not enough sleep or maybe even too much coffee and too much sleep, I’m falling into old habits and routines, and I’m restlessly resting. This city does that to you, or more so to me. I am descending back into the worst versions of me without ever really trying. I don’t know what to do with myself. Finishing half things, being half somethings, half listening, half caring. Maybe all the heat does beat you down. But then I love the sun, how warm it is, how reliable, how big and glorious it is. I like being in its warm golden glow, how it dances on the ocean, how it tears into the sky. Not this one though, not the one I’m under right now. It’s hard to think it’s the same sun I lay under merely weeks ago. It never felt like it.
Sometimes you meet people who are like the sun, who teach you about the sun; they walk into a room, and suddenly it's so much warmer and more radiant; it sounds like a soft acoustic guitar being picked at from a distance or a chesty laugh. People like that are rare, you stumble upon them and can’t avoid their dazzling glow, and you’re fortunate if you get to keep their light around, to momentarily bask in it. They remind you that despite the often grim nature of life and people there is light that you can reach for within yourself, there is warmth and joy to be found in every space inhabited.
You witness that sunlight every day, you live in it a little bit, sometimes you forget to relish it, you forget you’re going to be under a different sun, really when you think truthfully to yourself, you don’t want another sun, you don’t know what they all feel like but you know the one you have is just right. Then you go back to your other sun, it's far too hot and beating down your neck and you’re fighting to save yourself, you know some people love this sun; the lizards that crawl out of the sand, the thorny cacti… But you were made for a gentler existence, a more delicate sun; one that birds sing to and cats bathe under. But you still get to have a sun, it’s not right but it’s a Sun, and you long for the sun you had, that perfect shining sun. You miss the way it woke you up, kissed your window, the way it said good night, and promised it too, the way when you walked out every morning it smiled. You smiled right back, how it swore summer would come. It would shine the brightest again, stay up for a little while longer, how every day you could smell it coming closer in the air, sometimes you didn’t even believe it, maybe it overpromised, maybe it lied, maybe summer won’t be good again, perhaps the sun will never be good again, maybe it’ll turn into that rancid, sweltering creature you know most of the time. But that’s what’s powerful about it, it has the power to make you choose to believe in every day. It sets and rises, and it reminds you. All will be well. You will return, to your sun, the sun you love so much, it will dip behind the mountains and come out of the ocean, and there is nothing quite as glorious as stepping out of the grey fluorescently lit airport to being under that sun again, it winks at you and gives you the bluest sky, one even your mind couldn’t perfectly conjure, not even a photo could deliver that perfect shade of blue. You’ll drive down the coast, and it’ll follow you until the end of the line. It’ll be good again.