The sun is behind
The sun is behind the tail of the cloudband, far to the south. The clouds have encroached on the beach to the extent that their steely underbellies are visible. The sea to the south shimmers with white dashes. The rest of the ocean is black. The glimmers fade away and return. The sky between the clouds and the ocean is white, then pale blue, then grey. Every bit of the day is on its own course. The sun is on my face and neck then it is gone. It is too easy to watch the day become finite. Every moment has a real duration marked by unknowable changes in every bit and aspect. I know that it is all changing. It is moving forward. The things around me dont move or change. The air and the light change. In the sunlight I feel every moment slip away as it happens making the day into a series of recollections. My life is spiraling away in the sun and dry breeze but I let it fall into those immediate recollections that I neednt experience. I know that the day ends and then is another day. At my desk the still flood of time, with me in it, begins from whence it ended. I dont know that the earth or sun are moving, that the tides are ebbing or clouds churning, that someone is walking in the sun or laying in the dim, that the late afternoon glare is shining through dust floating in my apartment, that my body is decaying, that my heart is beating and blood is pooling in my feet. I dont need to. So much of living is rote or asleep that I dont need my body at all. When there is nothing in the world I only need faith that time is moving forward. But out here under the wide open sky that faith isnt necessary, or possible. But I cant trick myself either. That faith was less a desire than it was a brace. If I had the control in there to abandon my body, abandon the world and let myself expire, out here I am alive and heavy. I cast a pale shadow on the sand and if I lay here long enough it will stretch into the dunes and up into the desert.