Write Me
a Sunset

The light goes sideways here. Not down — sideways, as though it is trying to stay a little longer by taking a longer route home. Tonight it moved across the snow in a strip of amber the exact colour of the old honey my mother kept above the stove, and I stood at the lantern room window and forgot for a moment that I was supposed to be working.

The sea below went perfectly flat, which it almost never does, and for one minute I could not tell where the water ended and the reflection of the sky began. There was a seal — just the one — on the far rock, looking west with what seemed like real intention. I have been alone here for nineteen days and I understand the seal completely.

I wound the mechanism twice, lit the lamp, and then went downstairs and made tea I did not drink.

My knees are deep in the paddy when the sun touches the ridge and the whole terrace turns the colour of raw egg yolk. It happens fast — maybe forty seconds — and then it shifts to something older and darker, the colour of the floor of my grandmother's kitchen, and then it is gone. My husband says I stop working every evening to look, and I say yes, of course I do, because forty seconds is not very long and I have had this view my whole life and I am still not finished with it.

The water in the paddies holds the sky — each terrace its own little sky, going up and up the mountain — and from certain angles you are standing in the middle of a painting that is also standing in the middle of you. The egrets come just before dark, always from the north, always in pairs. I count them the way my mother counted her blessings.

I am planting the last rows tomorrow. The light will do what it does and I will look again.

The train was running forty minutes late out of Calama when the desert did the thing it does: turned purple without warning. I have driven this line for eleven years and the colours in the Atacama at dusk still make me feel I am trespassing on something private. There are no trees here, no water, nothing to soften the edge between earth and sky — just a line so clean it looks drawn by a machine, except no machine has ever made anything that colour.

My passengers mostly look at their phones. I used to find this painful but I have made my peace with it. Someone has to watch, and tonight that someone was me and one small girl in a red anorak who pressed her face against the glass of car four and left a little fog-print I saw when I walked through at Baquedano. She had been crying at the window — not sad crying, I think — the kind where the feeling is too large for your face.

We arrived forty-three minutes late. I logged it as weather-related, which is not wrong.

I put my chair on the small balcony — the one with the broken rail I keep telling your uncle to fix — and I watched the light come off the Tejo tonight in the way that only happens in July, when the river is bronze and the tiles on the building opposite catch it and throw it back. The whole city goes warm at once. You cannot plan for it; it simply arrives, the way the best things do.

There was a fado coming from the radio inside Dona Helena's window below me, and a cat on the rooftop, and a tram going up the hill with three tourists hanging off the side looking at everything with their mouths open, which is the correct way to look at things here. I was eighty-one years old on the balcony in July and I was not sad about anything. I thought that was worth writing down before I forgot what it felt like.

Come visit before the summer is finished. I will make the bacalhau the way you always ask for and we will watch the river turn bronze together.

I had worked fourteen hours straight when I stepped outside at handover and the sky above the generator shed was doing something I do not have clinical language for. Everything between the rooftop water tanks and the horizon was the colour of old hibiscus, deep red-orange going up into a violet that had no business being that beautiful above a hospital car park. I stood in my scrubs in the heat and let it happen to me.

We lost someone difficult tonight and saved someone we weren't sure we could, and I walked out into that sky carrying both things, and the sky didn't care at all about either of them — it was just burning the way it always burns along the lagoon — and somehow that made it easier. I wasn't asking it for anything. I was only standing there being a person in the world for a moment, which I had not done in fourteen hours.

I took one photograph and then I put my phone away because it wasn't enough and the real thing was still there. I walked back in. There were three more hours to go.