Author : Peter Merani

I like to watch it all go dark. To see if the world knows from up here how the evening folds in half. I used to think each individual sunset was its own glorious diamond. I would run to the top of the hill with Chawa as the sun flared up and flickered vibrant magentas and dark blues glowing as if they were alive. In a vacuum you think a lot about gapping absences.

To me, it is color.

But from up here, standing in a starship I know that the mystical spectacles are mere axis rotation of the planet. That my once great view from a top a tall hill is nowhere near as perfect as my view from the window of The Gladium.

“You’ve got a view of the play from the backside of the curtain,” said the captain. “How do you feel about that?”

Floating in space is different than I expected. I spend my nights wide-awake, tossing and counting and noting every single variation from how I thought it would be. Do views ever get old, is the question I ask myself before I sleep.

Standing before the captain, I’m inclined to say yes, but then I watch that view, the most incredible, most minimizing spin of our little blue ball, and I can feel all the people who see it down on the hill. The grounders. The sky whispers. The captain is an older man who has terribly bright green eyes and they glow like traffic lights on a road in the night.

Green is between blue and yellow on the color spectrum, but I notice that there has never been a green sunset and probably there never will be. I’ve learned to live with that. From down on the hill, once night has claimed its domain, it’s easy to forget that on the other side of the world the sun is flooding the sky.