sunset

“Sunset.”

This is how my friends reacted to my first post, or to the stock picture I attached to it. No question mark, but I could hear the doubt behind the words.

Is that how you see your new beginning? they seemed to be asking, smirking as they said the word.

I thought about it for a while.

“A matter of perspective,” I said. “The sun also rises. It’s always rising somewhere, even if what we call a sunset looks like an ending.” Hemingway meant something different when he wrote that epic, but I liked the echo. And my friends and I do enjoy trading puns.

“I see,” they said. “So it goes.”

“Not with a bang but a sunrise.”

“Out of the night that covers me . . . comes a little daylight.”

We laughed and opened a bottle of Douro to celebrate my rising somewhere on this planet of eight billion people, all waiting—

(or so we imagined, or so we assure one another)—

to read my book.

Well . . . maybe we had more than just one bottle of red.

And by the way, the picture was of a sunrise. Can you tell the difference?