Deep Thoughts: Sunset Edition

For Janet Fitch's "Techniques of Fiction" class, we have to describe things like weather and textures and smells and then relate them to the psychological. Sometimes, I feel like I may have come up with something kinda smart. Here it is:


Whenever I see a sunset I wish there was someone with me. Pink-tinted butter cream frosting clouds spread over a clear blue sky. The sun is hidden, concealed by a carpet of gray. I know it is there from the color of the sky and the faint bars of rays ejecting underneath. Then the sun breaks like an egg yolk spreading over a hot pan, sprinkling the sea caps with light, transforming the sheen of the water to that of an 80s style taffeta prom dress.

The pinks radiates brighter as the sun goes down, maturing electric and vivid, while the blue fades paler. Soon the blue holds steady as a tinge and the pink is reduced to grayish fibers. The sky steeps to the color of iced tea and clouds shimmer like little smudgy islands, stacked on top of each other, layered like a cotton ball collage. My hands tingle slightly in the wind as I try to steady my pen.

I'm freezing, realizing it is way too cold to even consider walking to the beach at sunset in January. My towel, which I expected to sit on, is swathed around me. I had to turn it upside-down and face away from the beach in order to catch the right wind and quickly wrap it over my head and shoulders. Cold injects my ears, inciting a swift headache. I sit on the damp sand, my ears throbbing with coldness, I can’t think about anything, not even what this sunset is supposed to be or look like.

A Coldplay song sticks in my head. “No one ever said it was easy, no one said it would be this hard. I’ll take it back to the start.” When I look at the weather, especially a sunset, I feel so small. This is a good thing. When I sit on the beach, I am just a shortish girl huddled under an orange towel, cheeks whipped by a cold wind I can’t turn off or control. In our society we have weather channels, weather people, meteorologists, but one of our famous catchphrases is, “you can’t predict the weather.” We can’t predict anything. I spend a lot of time making predictions. Making big things out of nothing, finding the metaphor, even when “what is” is so simple I don’t need to search for some deeper meaning. I feel like everything does have meaning. Or that it should.

Maybe a sunset is like the Aristotelian triangle of rising action, climax, and then denouement. How about a love story in which two people are too anxious to get to a sunset's glowing pinks, forgetting they will no doubt fade into that iced tea tinge? What is the tinge of a relationship? It’s the stormy waters of having to have talks and discussions about feelings, which I always dread because I can never seem to say my feelings out loud, I can only feel them. Sometimes I can write them out, but after I do so, I want to go back and edit and explain and retract.

Maybe our purpose should be to just enjoy those deep, glowing pinks and end the loop in our heads warning us that the tinge is inevitable. Like love, sunsets are inherently complicated and miraculous and natural. They’re passionate and deep and changing. They can barely be described. You just look into them, humbled and awestruck, happy to have witnessed the shifting colors and textures of the sky.

They way two people feel about each other is always shifting and changing. Maybe those feelings don’t need to be dissected and autopsied. I certainly spend a great deal of time listening to my girlfriends trying to figure out why so-and-so called or didn't, what the time he called meant, if they will see these guys again. I spend a lot of time talking to my girlfriends, not about the specifics of what a guy says and does, but how I feel about him and what it means.

But what are we really talking about? Feelings with no names, manifestations of past expectations that weren't met, our fears? My mom says that young people today do too much talking about our feelings. That we should just feel them and get on with it. I am starting to agree.

I'm not sure if I'm doing this assignment correctly, but thanks, sunset, for sharing.