The sun will rise again
The sun will rise again,
from below the mountain,
I waited for the sunrise at 5 a.m. from the top of a mountain in Maine. The early sun rays had only just begun to light the sky, yet the hours I had already been awake made the day feel like two. I had trouble falling asleep the night before, but I had squeezed my eyes shut and wished for darkness to wash my consciousness away. Eventually, my imagination broke the ceiling above so that only the twinkling stars of Orion and the Great Dipper lay over my head.
where lichen grow,
My middle school best friend recently began crocheting for fun. When I met her, we barely reached 5 feet and had tall dreams of becoming lawyers. We both moved the year after we met, I to the next town over while she crossed multiple state lines. She tinkers with computers now while I translate my aimless thoughts on paper. I visit her every few years in Rhode Island, and every reunion ignites the old soul in us as we recall each promise we made as kids to grow up together in New Jersey.
on rocks and trees anchored to the Earth,
“What is friendship?” a friend asked me in our Airbnb in the woods, just a few days before we watched that sunrise. As a child, any kid who shared my favorite color and wanted to play tag with me on the playground became an instant friend. But as the clock ticked towards adulthood, I traded in favorite colors for complex values like companionship, community, camaraderie. But still, none of those words seem quite right to capture the moment my friend once lit the stove at 10 p.m. to make me kimchi fried rice when I returned to my dorm after spending six hours reporting a story. Or the way I met up with my middle school best friend just yesterday for the first time in four years, the distance created by time completely nonexistent. Perhaps in any stage of life, friendship is simultaneously simple and unexplainable.
to meet the ocean’s horizon
Two days before my sunrise trip to the mountain top, I realized it had been forever since my pen last touched my diary. April 20, 2025. That was also the last time I texted one of my close friends from high school. At some point, routine had taken over and smothered the embers of the stories I had left to tell both her and my notebook. But in between the empty pages, life happened to me just as the sun dutifully raises its banner every day, including cloudy ones.
where blue and red light the sky on fire
The day before we watched the sun climb up the sky, my friend tried explaining to me what a lichen tour was, and I asked her if it was an old people activity. We didn’t end up taking the tour and hiked three mountains instead. How humbling it felt to be attempting the same climb as some people half my age and others three times my age. May I have even half their vitality when I’m older.
before casting its light over the world at its peak.
The night after that sunrise, my friends and I found ourselves having wandering conversations at a bar in Portland. The darkened skies let loose some sense of delirium in our heads as we neared our 20th hour of staying awake. As I drank my slightly bitter, slightly sweet beer, I told them how I had been having writer’s block for a while. I had spent the past few months trying every remedy – from people watching outside cafes to blowing wishes on my fallen eyelashes. Maybe it was the alcohol or the everything-and-everywhere direction of our conversation, but now it seems I somehow stumbled across whatever I needed in Maine to reignite the fiery click-clack of my keyboard when I returned home.