At dusk I watched the sun dip behind a mountain, for the first time in days. The sky went from gold to pink to blue in a matter of what seems seconds. Feeling my friend Sadness approach, I got up and scurried out of the house, into the indifferent evening. I walked past huddled houses and shops, the ruined castle, fields dotted here and there with sheep. Circling toward home, I apprehended the mountain the sun had sunk behind. Clouds shrouded it. What did the mountain look like again? It's up to the imagination to make it solid again, rather than a king of the air. Picturing the people who had loved and lived for millennia in the constant shadow of that mountain, I felt in that embracing darkness as if I had walked into another century, my grief far, far away from me.

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