And the sky tonight as the sun went down was breathtaking. Deeper and lighter purples shading into ruby and blood orange, gold spending itself in smudged powder coral, cerulean steeped in lilac and bruised rose, iron out of focus behind a damp and gossamer veil of baby’s breath. Naturally, I spent an inordinate amount of time looking into my rear view mirror, trying to take as much in as possible, as I traveled northeastward home, sometimes, surreptitiously, craning my head around to glance at the sky. Dangerous, I don’t doubt, but I didn’t really care too much if it was. The sky seemed to respond, becoming more blood and fire, more lead and ocean depth, more cruel in its beauty. I wondered if there was a volcano spewing ash somewhere, lofting ash into the sky. (In fact, Tungurahua, in Ecuador, recently erupted, but I still have no idea if that’s why the sky was so spectacular.) The light seemed to capture a still life fraught with kinetic portent.

Ahead of me the mountains lay like monstrous blue-black waves, foam capped, with fairy lights irregularly spangling their flanks. The distant view of home. I flew along in my little cockpit, the car a machine toned by its inertia, an inhabited bubble with thoughts like psychological bacteria swimming in that living space curved upon itself. The sunlight faded steadily, unstoppable in its gradual disappearance, silent as silence itself, superimposed upon by the constant whoosh-rush of my heartbeat pushing past my inner ear, upon which, superimposed, the drone of the  seemingly endless conversation on NPR, to which I no longer had any attention to pay.

Imagine me, you reader, if you care to. This falling night, here in my particular hemisphere, alone in my car, fairly floating along the inmost lane of the freeway like a blood cell caring not whither I would go, yet arriving almost certainly there. Imagine that within me there is that sunset exploding and diffusing itself across the vast plain of my heartland. And in that place are no freeways nor destinations, and light itself is called breath and wind emotion. And if you can so imagine this, then you may catch a glimpse of history unfolded like the night across the bed of the unfathomable sea of being. Nor does it matter aught, save insofar as you know it in yourself and prise the meaning from the nonce.