Silence

Tonight’s sunset wasn’t the boldest I have ever seen.
It didn’t streak across the sky in wild ribbons of fire or paint the clouds in colors that demand you stop everything just to feel alive. But after a week swallowed by grey, a week of barren fields and frozen winds and a world that looked like it had forgotten how to breathe, this small burst of color felt like a hand reaching out of the cold.

The kind of cold we had today doesn’t lend itself to beauty.
It bites through coats and gloves and makes your eyes water the second you step outside. It turns every inhale into a sting and makes even short walks feel like a punishment. The days have been long and heavy, the kind where the sky barely changes and everything feels muted or asleep.

That kind of winter wears on you.
It settles into the quiet places.
It makes you wonder if the sun remembers how to rise for you at all.

So when it finally pushed through tonight, just a thin line of orange pressed against the horizon, just enough pink and gold to soften the clouds, I felt something loosen inside me. Not joy. Not relief. More like a reminder. A small, almost trembling insistence that even the bleakest stretches eventually break.

There is something tender about sunsets like this.
The quiet ones.
The ones that don’t announce themselves.
The ones that look like they are offering whatever little light they have left, hoping it will be enough.

It hit me harder than I expected.
Maybe because everything has felt so dim lately.
Maybe because I am tired in the way winter makes you tired, tired in the way that comes from carrying invisible things for too long.
Maybe because every day has felt like it blends into the next, all of them silver and silent and cold.

But tonight, the sky remembered color.

It was not spectacular.
It was not loud.
But it was present.

And presence alone can feel like a miracle after so many days of nothing but grey. After so many hours of wind that cuts through you and fields that look lifeless and mornings that never fully brighten.

I stayed longer than I needed to, watching the last thin glow disappear behind the line of trees. The air stung my face. The cold settled deeper. But it felt worth it.

Because even if tomorrow returns to grey, even if the frozen world closes in again, at least I had this one moment. This one quiet offering of beauty. This one reminder that winter does not get the final word.

For a brief moment, color pushed through the cold.
For a brief moment, the world softened.
For a brief moment, I remembered that I am still here too.

Summer ended in silence.
Not the peaceful kind.
The kind that creeps in like fog across the hills—soft, slow, and heavy.
The kind that makes everything look the same,
but feel different.

There was no final campfire.
No porch full of laughter.
No loud goodbyes or last-night chaos.

Just a storm.

The kind that settles over the mountain like a sigh.
Not loud. Not violent.
Just steady. Aching.
Like the sky itself was grieving.

And maybe it was.
Maybe it was mourning the end of what we carried all season.
Maybe it was finally letting go of the weight we never said out loud.

Because that storm—
It didn’t just fall.
It washed.
It bled through the cracks we’d patched too quickly.
It soaked through the spaces we never had time to feel.
And it left everything raw.

The road glistened.
The fields were quiet.
The mountain felt hollow.

Like it had been wrung out.

And maybe we had been, too.

Because this summer—
It cost us.

It cost late nights and early mornings.
It cost cracked hands and tired knees.
It cost pretending we were fine when we weren’t.
It cost silence from people we trusted to see us.
It cost the versions of ourselves we had to become just to survive.

And when it was over,
when the last walkie call faded and the last goodbye didn’t come,
there was only the storm.

Only the rain carving lines down the windows like tears we never had time to cry.
Only the sky, bruised with light, like it, too, had been holding everything in.

But after the storm, the mountain looked different.

Cleaner.
Emptier.
More honest.

Like it had stopped pretending.

And maybe that’s what endings really are—
not neat, not pretty.
But necessary.
A reckoning.
A chance to exhale everything we held too long.

It still hurts.
The shift.
The quiet.
The ache of not hearing your name over the radio.
The porch light that stays off.
The room that no longer smells like sweat and bug spray and sleep deprivation.

But healing doesn’t always come gently.
Sometimes it comes like a storm.
Sometimes it strips everything bare.
Sometimes it doesn’t ask permission.
It just breaks you open,
so something softer can grow.

And when it passes,
you’re not the same.

The mountain isn’t either.

But maybe,
maybe that’s the point.

The Stars Take Note

Color At The Edge Of A Barren World

The Storm That Washed the Mountain