Apocalyptic

Ash, from forest fires.  Swirling around my head when I got off of the bus, I tried to brush it away with my hands, thinking it was a swarm of gnats, then noticed it falling from the sky.  Last time we had ash was in 1980 when the Mt St. Helens blew.  Wondered if I missed the news (joked about nuclear winter.  Perhaps if you were born after 1991, you don't get that. We thought we were free of the fear, but there was never a full disarmament.  But we all grew up with the fear of nuclear war, or at least it always played in the background: life goes on.) The sky full of smoke above.  My co-worker pulled me outside to look at the sun: red.

Last night I walked out to the lake to watch the sun, trying to finish one last book in my room, and lying in a pool of sweat, the orange light shining on my wall.  The sun disappeared into nothingness, as a man pulled out his camera to shoot a photo behind me.  Didn't even set, just faded into gray.  When the light got too low to read, I went to a bar, which has some air flow, stayed 'til it was dark.

By the time I walked home, the moon had risen high enough to see, blood red.  No one else seemed to notice, and I wanted someone else to look at it.  Finally, heading up my street, a man walking his dog stopped to take a picture of the moon but I didn't say anything to him, he was on the other side of the street and in his own world.  It was visible from the sidewalk in front of my house, but no one was home, so I couldn't drag any of my housemates out to look at it.  Went on facebook, and the first post I saw was a friend mentioning it:  knew there must've been some deeper reason I wanted to know you back when we met.  Today, more of my friends are commenting on it.

Still haven't finished the book.  The bingo thing needs to be turned in today.  I've got about 100 pages left, so might be doable (but it's dense.)  I'm in a section where a long-term friendship (decades) was destroyed, and I remembered one of the first books I finished for this thing dealt with a similar issue.  (Judy Blume, "In the Unlikely Event," and Pascal Mercier, "Night Train to Lisbon.")  The unquenchable pain, bookends my summer.