Sunsets and rocks and lying on the grass

"...I still can't find the language to describe how breathtakingly beautiful sunsets are - not breathtakingly, actually, but breath-givingly beautiful... Toni Morrison once wrote, 'At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.' So what can we say of the clichéd beauty of sunsets? Perhaps only that they are enough." - John Green

"This is what we get, all we get/ sunsets and each other/ and rocks to climb over to get to the sea/ too tough to go through it alone/ so you’re forced to hold/ someone’s hand/ what a beautiful way to be."

Having claimed a spot in the park where the sun would fall perfectly, my best friend and I had thrown down our bags and were sitting cross-legged in a gentle almost-silence watching the sun go down. He was talking about how this song crescendos (Seed by Peter Cat Recording Co.), by using his hands to show an upward movement because he couldn’t find the words. So, with Lifafa’s voice playing through my phone’s feeble speakers, we listened to the music rise like a wave and lost ourselves in the slightly dizzying haze of a really good song.

Pushing our bags behind our heads we laid down in the grass on our makeshift pillows, facing the sky. Everything bathed in yellow-orange-golden with the blue still arching above. All around us we could hear the ceaseless, excited chatter of people, see kids running around and their mothers and fathers following, a ball or frisbee thrown here and there. Suddenly I had that sinking but not altogether painful feeling that we were growing up, but also somehow that time had, for now, paused. Or at least slowed down tremendously, with the sound of distant laughter and footsteps and conversations we weren’t a part of. 

It was the sound of lives being lived in real time, so many at once, altogether. Beneath the sky but more so beneath all this life living itself, we were small, so small. The sky so far away yet somehow still ours. Laying on the grass, tapping our feet and swaying our heads to the rhythm, opening and closing our eyes. Like this, slowly, we were sinking our teeth into the moment, or the moment was sinking its teeth into us. 

And although love always aches to leap forth from our restless tongues, especially on days like these, in that moment I knew nothing had to be said. It is a wonderful feeling, that invisible, indescribable yet almost tangible certainty cemented deep in your chest that you call friendship. It was enough to share the same sky, the same song, to be bathed in the same noise. 

And, also, to know that everyone else was doing that too. Our lives intersecting with all of these people and their lives, all of us strangers little worlds in ourselves existing at the same time as each other. I believe you pick your miracles, and this was one of them, for some reason I cannot describe.

And as the sun began to hang low in the sky, we watched the scene sprawled before us:

There were people descending the rocks to get to the sea, some of them climbing back up, couples or groups of three all struggling together. People extending their hands, these hands being held and held on to until they made it all the way to the edge. The backdrop of the sun in a flaming tangerine colour against what felt like the simplest act of human existence, the beauty of the human condition - the urge to catch a sunset or to feel the water beneath your toes, and the urge to do it with people you love. To look at beautiful things with people you find beautiful and calling that the time of your life. What a rare and inexplicably human joy, the ability to be swayed by a sunset and a little bit of love. 

And so we walked across the rocks together too, afraid we would trip but determined to get to the sea. He mentioned that they looked like planets or asteroids under our feet. When we got to the edge, he began to throw pebbles into the sea and we laughed at his aim and the fact that they made no sound as they sank feebly into the water. 

And just then I thought that I wouldn’t be anywhere else. I wouldn’t choose another world. Over and over I would choose this resilient reality of ours where, even in a world that so often disappoints us, we watch sunsets with people we love and hold their hands as we descend the rocks, and we let that be enough.