Written by Mac Carey
While I drive another commute home this evening, concrete overpasses and downcast
faces are painted with a dignity not due to them. The background noise of bird calls now cuts
through the hanging half-light. It feels safe to speak of things one never would any other time of
day, in voices nothing like our own.
In my years through the relentless desert of depression, when even the lull of sleep was
few and far, I always had dusk. Whether the brief burning end of a winter’s cigarette or the
drawn-out hush of summer, at dusk the borderlands of past and present, real and imaginary, are
thin. It is as wise as silence. It is as unearned as redemption.
I’ve been a late riser all my life, so the observance of dawn is the result of a night riven
with grief or worry. But at dusk—even as I get older and there’s never enough time—my hectic
heart and mind are stilled.
There is something larger than us, but the greater comfort is the insinuation that the
something just might be beautiful. In the final strokes of daylight, we are redeemed through
beauty, before collapsing, slowly and then all at once, into the dark. To rise up and do it again.
.
Mac Carey’s nonfiction work has appeared in Texas Monthly, Washingtonian, Halfway Down the Stairs, and forthcoming in Oxford American. She lives in Virginia in a 170-year old house with no bedroom closets but one possible ghost.