There's No Town Called Big Sur, continued

Watching the sun set into the ocean can only happen on a cliff like this, high above the end of everything, in a place like this, along together and at peace with our traveling. We've been waiting for this for so long I don't know what it is anymore. A bright red Japanese-flag sun dips lower, towards the elusive horizon, wrapping itself in the tall grasses, blackening them with its shadow. The haze of California (though we are hours from Los Angeles, so it's all natural fog) makes the whole sky look like the aftermath of an explosion, which I guess is what the sun really is, after all.

He pulls out his camera, the orange and brown strap betraying its age and generation, decades before us. Every time I dig back into my memory for a classic moment to retell, the camera is there; do I remember because of the idea that I should be snapping a shutter on the night, too? Or simply because a photograph exists, a tangible reminder that illuminates the other sensory details more clearly than the average time-from-the-past? The sun still burned as red as a flame, wherever that recollection was born. We tried to lift our bare feet, protruding from the end of the unzipped sleeping bag, into the frame, to capture our presence at this sunset, our participation in this memory, but he couldn't back far enough away. So the photograph couldn't be manipulated to reveal the whole truth.

Other things the photograph forgot: my feet were cold, and I was surprised. The purple-bruised feeling of cold toes had already begun to fade in my seven-months in California-summer mind. My sleeping bag, the one pulled over us like a blanket, smelled like dust, from the gale-force windy night we spent in a tiny, blue tent, on his one-square-mile island three weeks ago. The right side of my neck was beginning to ache, from leaning against his flat, hard chest and twisting towards the disappearing sun. I loved him, and still do, but that never shows in photographs, even when our feet make it into the print.

We timed it, counting in Mississippis until the entire sphere had sunk below the ocean's arbitrary line against the sky, but here's another thing no one told me about California: you can still see the sun through the ocean. I sat up then, startled, actively bewildered at the bizarrely obvious realization. I can see through water, and the sun setting is actually the Earth rotating away from it. The sun isn't giving up on us, on California, on the ocean or land, on me, and she waits beneath the surface. A glimmering reflection, the explosion in a watery mirror, remained, promising me she'd be back in eight hours, and my mouth hung upon at the sense of it all. Everything made sense. We had driven all the way out here and all the way across the country and all the way to the Big Sur, a place that doesn't really exists to learn that the sun never really disappears and to tell everyone else about it.

He laughed, at my expression, and because he was taken aback as well. "Wherever we make it to this weekend, that's what we tell people." He made me promise. "Tell them we drove to Big Sur to see the sunset."