gloaming
Before the sunset fades into dusk, there is always a sliver of night that exudes a light navy – when the sky begins to glow like a lantern, lit from above by the lingering rays of warm sunlight blended with cool moonlight, looking wider than ever.
In a high school English class I learned that there is a word for this time – gloaming – an old Scottish term that literally means “the time of day right after the sun sets when the light is about to fade, but the world is not yet fully dark.”
These final minutes of the day have always been my favorite, ever since I was a little girl, for as the sky grew large I’ve always felt as if I grew alongside it, expanding gradually from inside out like a hot air balloon preparing for flight. The gloaming made me feel expansive, as if everything good I contained was endless – as if the day would never end and I could forever walk on into the night, feeling the breeze of summer against my moisturized cheeks, rejoicing in the gentle conclusion of another day lived.
Of course the gloaming was always transient, and the depth of the night always came, and as the darkness fell I would become small and narrow again – a big mind contained within a small body, limbs that fell feebly against a torso, not particularly muscular. If only I could pour the dark navy sky of gloaming into a jar and drink it like a potion, swallowing the hope.
Except now – In you I have found my gloaming. In your presence the world goes quiet; the sky hovers wide; the trees make way for my becoming. Beside you I feel at once the grandness and smallness of the world; a comforting solitude rooted in the recognition that despite being two amongst billions, for the time being it would be two amongst two.
In you I find the remains of the day – the shocking revelation that there was always more to live, that there were no finales in this life until the very last, that I would see you again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
In the little sliver of a world we share, I stretch my limbs out unhurriedly, grasping at the seconds that blended into hours and the hours that blended into the sky, filling up the atmosphere with my outstretched soul.
Perhaps such is love – the capacity to discern permanence in transiency, to make everyday an everlasting gloaming.