October 9 (retrieved from my laptop)

I sat in the bus as it wound its way up the hills, the sun melting down to the jagged horizon as night came nearer, though slowed by our ascent. The sky began to blaze orange, interrupted only by a pair of scarring clouds. The valley takes on a gauzy, painted quality at this time of night. The flat light makes the houses perched on top of hills glow, while the greenish-brown below disappears into haze. Tiny lights begin to dot the landscape, and the mountains take on a starker silhouette.

The sunset reminded me of a sunset I saw from the window of a bus similar to that one as I crossed the Andes from Chile to Argentina. There was a mostly-full moon, and the barren desert landscape had practically glowed until the final spurts of orange gave way to a purple, inky darkness. Months later, by then in northern Chile, I had seen an even more impressive sunset while perched on top of a rocky outcrop at the far end of an enormous sand dune. As the sun sank, and a full white moon rose from the opposite side of the earth, the desert turned yellow then pink then purple, until finally settling into a relentless, heavy black. I had taken a bus to get there as well, and remember sitting with my face plastered to the window to see the billions of stars explode into the dark night sky.

I seem to often be in buses. And I seem to see a lot of sunsets while I’m in them. I like seeing the world as it passes by my window. It lends itself well to introspection, I’ve learned, but it can also have a sort of anesthetizing effect on over-analysis. For me, at least, my eyes tend to take over for my brain as I contentedly pore over an endlessly unfolding groundcover of things to look at. I stop planning and anticipating and cataloging, and let myself just look. The movement of the bus lets me believe that it’s not entirely passive. Even when it’s dark, when the rest of the valley seems to have sunken into sleep, I’m still moving, for some not-entirely known reason. Depending on the day, this notion is either exhilarating, a mixture of frightening and depressing, or kind of boring. Today, I think it leans heavier toward the first, but it isn’t exactly cut and dry.