I was still dressed in the tights I’d had on for my last meeting with the moon as I walked up to the bus this morning. My friends were ahead of me, loading luggage in the stale yellow light of a solitary lamp. Goodbyes were dulled by the heavy sleep we were pushing off. 4 o clock and we were just as quiet and sure as the stars in the redwoods rimmed shy. My eyes blinked with the lights of the bus in the early morning; stirred by the signs of travel as if preparing for my next adventure. But I was going home.
When you look up at the sky here, you see blue. Not the grey of a storm or the orange sunsets that I saw in Fatima. It feels like watching a lifetime; how the sky’s blue is light and humble in its waking hours and gradually intensifies, then grows proud and heavy with itself. Darkness so full it could be dripping those falling stars. Things move slower the farther away they are from the earth’s center. 24 hours, an eternity in blue. I don’t know what color the sky was most of the time. My gaze was turned earthward, at the many incredible beings surrounding me. I think maybe if I looked to the sky more that day, I could have unraveled the hours and minutes and moments into their proper eternities by simply framing them against the blue. But I was going home, and it was against that pale cliff of a backdrop that I viewed our last day.
