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kingsandsailors

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There's something unexplainable about the colors of the sunset. It's a kaleidoscopic notebook where hope and death are written in shades of blue and orange, often so mixed up together you can't tell what's good and what's bad. Every day, the sky's telling us a story we haven't been wired to understand. One where there's no fine line between love and hate, forgiveness and revenge, right and wrong.

There's no white or black there. You can only have colors. None brighter or darker than the other, but each blinding. There's no axis to measure how happy or how sad you are. Or if it were, you'd always be stuck in the middle, but above it, in a different plan. Because it's above neutral. It's above what you know and what you don't. It's what everyone thinks they know but don't, and what someone thinks they don't know when they do.

The sunset's not peaceful as rain can be. It's not aggressive as a storm. It doesn't bring hope as the sunrise. It's not deceiving as the clouds or a summer rain.

It's a paradox because it's nothing at all. It can't be described, it knows no extremes but its own.

I guess it's pretty much like love. You don't love or hate love. You feel everything so intense and frightening that you lack descriptions. The only think you may know is that you have no idea who or what or where your soul is. It's neither lost nor found.

Love's not enlightening, nor does it throw you in a dark abyss. You're not surrounded by gray clouds either. You're not in heaven or hell, but in your mind. With everything you've built throughout your life. It's not a home, a beach or a glade, but your own sunset where all your extremes come together in shades of blue and orange.

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I often remember when I was a kid, around 5 or 6, and I'd get my share of sun and sea once a year, for a week. As someone born and raised far from the shore, in between dusty streets, ugly out-of-order factories and some random poorly maintained parks, the sea was some sort of magic. The sand was a canvas everyone could paint on. Not paint, paint. More like sketch with a blunt pencil. As a kid, there was nothing more to ask for. I remember being afraid of the sea at sunset. It didn't matter how young I've learned how to swim, or that for about 400 meters from the shore, the water was knee deep. I'd spend the whole day in and out of water, being sort of forced to eat or wear a hat at noon.  There were those two or three hours, from 12 to 3 pm when there'd be food around, and I was supposed to get out of the water. I'd try but get stuck on the shore, run to get my pencils and try to build a castle. Depending on the kind of day, I could spend the whole afternoon bringing water from 5 meters away to create a canal in between the castle walls, I'd decorate it and find imperfections once every two minutes. I'd try to fix them, and would somehow break something else. I never really managed to finish one, as everytime we'd see the sun going down, we'd pack our things and leave. I wasn't the kind of kid to cry or complain that we had to leave. Usually. I knew that the sea had to clean up the mess we made. At least that's what I've been told. That everyday, at sunset, the sea starts to clean itself up of every human trace. When I later found out from some shady TV program that most people drown at night, I thought it made sense. The sea would claim its prizes - too brave human beings, sand castles, whole cruises, that fancy pair of sunglasses you forgot to take off. I'd imagine all these things are harmlessly brought by violent waves in some sort of underwater vault, not really for safekeeping but for somehow thanking the sea for tolerating our species. Why would it need those kind of things? Who puts cruises on the same shelf as sand castles? Or human lives on the same shelfas a pair of sunglasses? I could imagine these things on the same shelf for some reason. Now. 'Cause life's really odd and things don't really matter. But the first time I've had my castle taken away, I cried. I'd had put some improvised flags around the space where it should have been, to keep perfecting it the next day. It sounds acceptable given how old I was, but I remember the taste of those tears 15 years later. They tasted like the ones I cried when I lost mom, or when I had my heart broken. Somehow the sea taught me what it's like to lose something before its time way before anyone or anything else.

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