What the Sunset Pulls From Me

There are seasons inside me that forget how to rain.

Even when grief arrives dressed for the occasion, even when life offers every reasonable excuse to break, something inside me refuses the weather.

My body has learned drought.

Maybe that is why the desert understands me.

I spent today looking across miles of sand, stone, cactus, and distant mountains, pen resting against paper as if the right words might wander in from the horizon. The land appeared empty until I watched it long enough.

Then everything began speaking.

The wind slipped through the brush as if it owned the land, uninvited and unapologetic. Shadows stretched themselves across the earth. The sun lowered slowly, spilling copper and fire over everything hard enough to survive here.

Then the song began.

Someone else’s words, carried by a rhythm gentle enough to slip past every locked door in me, reached a place I could not name. The tears came before I understood what they were mourning.

Maybe they were not mourning anything.

Maybe joy sometimes becomes too large for the body and escapes through the eyes.

Maybe it was this season of life, with its long roads and quiet rooms, its endless workdays and solitary miles, its questions I keep answering with movement because standing still would make everything I have been outrunning finally audible.

Maybe it was the sunset.

I am always chasing them across highways, trails, and unfamiliar towns where nobody knows my name.

I photograph the sky burning itself beautiful and stand beneath it looking peaceful, almost complete.

The photograph rarely tells the whole story.

A sunset can make solitude look sacred.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it is just loneliness wearing better lighting.

Still, I return because the sky never asks me to explain what I am feeling. It reminds me that endings can blaze, darkness can arrive gently, and beauty does not become less real because it cannot stay.

Maybe I keep following the sun because I still believe the light is taking me somewhere.

Toward another evening.
Another open road.
Perhaps, one day, toward a second shadow beside mine, a hand finding mine as the horizon turns gold.

Until then, I will keep showing up for the sky, writing down what it pulls from me, and leaving a little room beside me.

Listen to the song with me: