• the newspaper would once smack against the front door just after dawn and i would bring coffee in a large orange cup onto the front porch and read while the corner of the sky brightened pink and gold and blue; while the sun climbed to her heights, while my music would begin. and so, another beautiful day, this love affair with life. i am that easy but it begins with sun—

later in the day i would meet her out back, you know, the sun, and we'd share some time again. the summer sunshine...reminds me of my time in miami. sunshine was so hot, and so plentiful. there was enough to last all day and all night, too. you just saved some up in your skin.

and then autumn came and then the winter came. and the sun has been away. and we've been buried in rain.

not "the rain," not a Rainy Day, but a rain that pours and blows and is cold for weeks and weeks on end. a rain that lasts all through the night and greets you first thing every day.

everything begins to get soggy. everything begins to get wet. grass, and pine needles, and boxes stacked inside the garage; fabric interiors, fingers, folders, papers; water lapping at the edges of windows, mirrors, whispers. blurring all the edges, making damp and drugged dreams. you rise in the dark, and you go to sleep in the dark. you don't see fuchsia dawn suns because if they exist, it is behind woolly, wet, cloudy walls of whiteness...and rain.

but
yesterday the sun came out. and the sky was blue and bright. all day!

all day i wanted to walk in the sun. and we agreed we would, early on. mostly, waiting for her. the other her. not the sun. the little one. the moon. i kept checking, and waiting. she took an unusually long nap but she's been sick, so she was probably healing. and so the walk was postponed.

then, there were other things—hair brushings, preparations.... somehow, by the end of all of it, the day had gone by. as i waited in the living room, i watched the last of the day's light waning on the lawn. it was a tiny but poignant and private moment as i watched her last golden footsteps race up the longest grass stalk. i knew it was too late. and the voice that had nagged me all day that the sun was passing me by was now strangely mute. probably smiling too widely to speak.

my feet touched the sidewalk and the sun's long rays were just lifting away from a treetop here, or the edge of a mailbox there; her loving touch undoing itself before my eyes like a golden ship unplucking the neighborhood's ties. pushing off to the cosmic sea.

before we had traveled even two blocks, she was gone; she had slipped behind houses, ignored warnings now only my concern. all soon became forgiving hues of periwinkle and indigo.

and at night we walked again. and the moon was huge and awesome and beautiful. she followed us over well-lit lots, and faceless, dented sheds; over trailer parks and lonely, screaming, highways; over buzz-cut grassways and the stapled skin of splintering telephone poles, over the snarling of angry dogs and rippling skipping atop locked gates and swiftly slanting into mud-rutted, weed-thistled alleys. everywhere, she repainted each eager, frozen flower and dimmed the signs beneath her when she whispered. over all she hung low and terrible and magnificent and calm. she spoke to me like a mother, then. of my fragile vision, of a short, precious life and how our weaving, world-weary footsteps pale under her silvery sight....

• i hear the newspaper smack up against the house today and so i open the door expecting more night. the car lights glow neon as the driver moves on. i notice this reaching toward the mat. standing up with the paper, i see the corner of the sky—hot pink.