Sunrise

And all my words were bound to fail
I know you won't fail
See, I can tell---Remy Zero Fair


Sometimes you cling to people, to moments in the hope of prolonging a feeling. Sometimes you think you can make things better than they were, than they will be in the light of day. At night it's easy to be family with the people you surround yourself with. We spent a night together, five of us. Cramped together we were family. We joked, we connected and yeah, that's what friends do, I know, but in the dark of that room we had something.
When dawn threatened us we took the challenge. We steeled ourselves for the cold and marched out past the trees, past where the roads go and found us a place unmarked. If only for a few moments it would remain that way. It was ours to claim and we could make the moment ours. There were jokes, there was laughing, but there was a solemnity to it. For a few moments before the sun's tendrils reached across to the Western sky and lightened it from steel blue to bruise purple there was no sound but our breath and our foot steps. The thin ice gave way underfoot to loose snow. We tramped through lanes of cut corn, the stalks barely reaching over snow pack. To the North an owl hooted out the last moments of night.

I already knew, before we had even reached the field, how I would remember this day. I knew that some years down the way I would be up late one winter and I would follow strangers' tracks into this moment, into this venture. The blues would shine clear and though the sun rose plain, with little embellishment, in my memory I know the sun will be bright yellow, impossibly so and that I'll tell whoever I'm with that the sun blazed through the trees like fire, like the burning bush. "It burned bright, the heat palpable," I'll say, "as the temperature slowly ticked upwards. We watched it in silence, appreciated the hugeness of the moment. Mountains to the West and South, more trees and woodland to the North and, to the East, campus, life." I know I'll smile then, that melancholy smile you get when a story ends naturally, not in some tied up manner. It's that heartache of not knowing what happens afterwards. I'll think about that moment and in my head I won't see the night the way it was, it'll be photoshopped and airbrushed. Certain things will become embellished, other things will fade away.
I know that we won't talk too much about it. We won't want to worry off the edges of the night sooner than nature would force us; like a saint's medal, St. Jude Patron Saint of Lost Souls, we'll want to preserve the prayer and the smiling face of whatever it was that brought us together so perfectly that night. We'll finger it occasionally, when we need a place to hide, something to retreat to, but we'll be careful, trusting more in it's latent power than that we would have to invoke. Somehow it's stronger that way.

And so it'll go, years down the line, when we've all but forgotten why our youth was so precious we will remember the sun rising through the trees, the gold of the sky and how it bled to white, blue and finally bruised purple. We'll remember how the sky was suddenly fiery pink and purple when we crossed the threshold from our wild to the confines of campus. "City kids," they said. In the city you learn the expanse of minutae. You learn that the most cramped subway in the heat of August can be as open as the Wichita skyline. Here, in a place marked by farms and barns, cow pastures and grazing turkeys we can apply that expanse to something real, something physical. So we savor it. We relish the space to get lost in, the surrender in being in the middle of a land of wide fields, thick woods and rolling mountains. We embrace the perimeters of our valley, a natural demarcation between our lives as emerging adults and our lives as students and children. We embrace our safe haven and pretend not to see the glint of the bubble that enshrouds us.

One day when we are all old, we'll sit together and talk about how great it was to be able to stay up and see the sun rise with your friends. We'll all go quiet and look into our drinks. We'll decide then, without saying anything, to do it again.