I was sitting in the living room, watching something on my laptop after a long day, during which I was productive and stayed mostly off my phone, and during which I spent a lot of time outside. I waited in the sun for a late bus at a rural kind of stop, I played tennis at a court with leaves falling all over and with a loud murder of crows in a displaced deciduous tree, I ran nearly three miles along the beach, looking out at the sand and then the calm, calm Pacific, no white, no break. I was sitting in the living room, and the sun was setting. The sky was still mostly that pale grey color, but there was white and around it orange and then pink and then purple and then blue before there was the rest of the sky, and this wasn’t unusual at the beach in southern California. So I stayed on the loveseat, laptop on the armrest, rewarding myself for my time spent not doing this with doing this.

In the glass door, I saw my computer screen projected onto the sand, a glass door whose threshold I could cross and reach the sand, and it would all be very easy, but I didn’t cross the threshold or reach the sand, and I felt kind of ashamed at the look of the face of the lead actress in the reflection, like I was contaminating nature with my sacrilegious technology. I finished the episode of TV I was watching and looked up and around. The other person in the living room was on his computer, too, but doing something productive, and this was a kind of pass not to look at the sun as it was setting, even though it was spectacular, because the sun always sets, every night, and this task isn’t here every night.

I looked out through the glass doors again, across the physical threshold, though I didn’t feel there was much of a metaphysical one between me and the sand. What difference did it make if there was a sheet of glass between me and that sunset? What caught my attention (a very hard thing to catch, these days) was that, though my episode finished, the sky looked still the same, as if it had paused. I don’t believe in God or anything, nor did I hear a voice in my head, but the stillness read to me like the universe had paused the sunset so that I could see it. “Hello, Miss On Her Computer in the Living Room. I’ll ask again: please take a look at the image to your left. I’ll wait until you do.”

So, I did what any salvageable person would do. I stood up, I opened the door’s three locks and stepped over the threshold, onto the sand. Hello, sky.

In my past experience with sunsets, I’d found that you can really only look at them for so long, if it’s just you and the sunset in the equation. If you have a friend there or if you’re throwing a frisbee or listening to some good acoustic music, that’s an entirely different equation. But the math is, if it’s you and the sunset, you get bored. Sunsets are often beautiful, but are also often.

I did my due diligence, though. I looked around, left to the deep blue, right to the brightest orange, down at the purplish sand, up into the swirl of colors, weirdly acutely aware of the roundness of the atmosphere. Thirty or so crows silently flew overhead, and I thought about the crows on the tree at tennis, and about if they were the same, and about how I didn’t know how many crows were in a murder, but it sounded nice. Their blackness against the sky looked like brushwork, like it took just a couple of strokes of paint to invoke the likeness of a crow. They moved almost too linearly, even as they passed right over me. I craned my neck to watch them, noticed that very quickly the colors seemed to be changing, as if the universe had pressed play and then fast-forward on the sunset.

I tried to find a way to assess how fast it was moving, how dark it was getting. I tried to eyeball the interior angles of what looked like an obtuse triangle of yellow in a larger patch of pink, but somewhere between the supernova streaks of color, which were stellar in an existential and sort of terrifying way, it is.

The sunset is here, and here is the sunset. My feet are in the sand and my face is in the air, which is at once life-sustaining oxygen and motherly venom the ocean wind can’t seem to debride, and in every moment, it is.

In every moment, all is still.

The sky is, the air is, the sunset is, I am, yes, I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am

Suddenly, I hear a caw, and I realize: I can’t see the damn crow against the sky.