The Sky

I find myself looking up to the sky as of late: the beauty of the sun rising through the trees, the heavy, thick clouds of the humid afternoon which threaten a downpour but rarely do, the pink layers of the sunset in the distant sky. I smile because it consoles me.

I have an incredible picture of the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean that I took some years ago while vacationing with the entire family. The sun was big and full and round, and so was my family. I remember sipping coffee on the back deck at 5:30 while three other families slept soundly, and glancing up to see my best friend's husband standing behind me with a cup of coffee in his hands, watching it rise just as intently. We didn't say much at all, and the only sound was the click of our cameras. I wonder if he remembers that morning.

I've looked at that picture on several occasions throughout the past four years, focusing on the truth of a sunrise... another day that begins the same but differently, a new chance to make a difference, another day to perceive heartbreak, to conceive heartache, to feel, to believe, to by joyous, to be astounded or confounded. My eyes, when they've been on the horizon over the past four years, have always seen this picture.

Two days ago, I enlarged it and it sits in a beautiful wooden frame, broadly across the wall of my newly painted breezeway. When I leave for work, it is the last thing I see and when I arrive home, it is the first.

Give love. Show love. Be love. This horizon is my newest mantra, and believe me, it is not always easy.

When the one word question: why? comes to me, I look up. When the lump of sorrow in my throat threatens release, I look up. When tears fall, when my chin quivers, I look up. And I try to always believe.

Tonight my heart has sunk below the horizon. It wasn't anything anyone said or did, it is just the way the breeze moved through the trees, the way the humidity felt on my upper lip, the sound of a piano solo playing through my truck speakers, the echo of a laughter I once heard, the picture of a gravestone that no sister should ever have to see or share with her parents.

Yet tomorrow... tomorrow... tomorrow the sun will rise again, and so will I.

And next week when I visit my family and stand beside the new grass at a new gravesite, and feel the breeze pass through me as I pray for a lost soul, I shall take a deep breath, I shall allow my tears to fall to the ground and I shall force my eyes to look up once again.