It was summer when the sun went down. It was the middle of summer, when the weather is at its hottest and everything seems relaxed and school seems infinitely distant in both directions. Camille and I were laying on the shore, soaking in the sun, praying for the good fortune of getting tans without sunburns. We had both fallen asleep, and I woke up just as the sunset was finishing, as that bright orb of fire was about to descend beneath the horizon line. I watched as it disappeared, and we were completely blanketed in darkness, as the moon was unseen then. I sighed and pulled out my phone to check the time, trying not to think about the awful sunburns we must have acquired, if we'd been asleep long enough for the sun to disappear. But as I looked at my screen, the numbers in front of my eyes, I found that it wasn't night at all. I didn't quite register those numbers. I sighed and woke up Camille, figuring my phone must have the wrong time. She yawned and rubbed her eyes and when she sat up and saw the darkness around her, she groaned. I asked her for her phone, and she dug into her bag and pulled it out. I pressed the talk button and the brightness of the phone illuminated the sand as I looked at the time. I frowned- her phone said 2:34, too. I handed her phone back to her and she rose an eyebrow at the time. We didn't really except the time until we walked over to my car and the time that flashed on the dashboard matched that of what had shown up on our phones. Then we drove home in confused silence, and I had to turn on my brights because it was too early in the day for the street lamps to light up the road in front of us.
I remember wishing I could go to school, if only for the feeling of regularity, which was now missing completely from my life, as our town- and the whole world, really- slipped into chaos.
Everything closed. Not right away, but after a few weeks of the darkness, everyone was so scared, no one was working. So everything closed. I sat mostly on my bed and stared at my skylight, at the sky that was now dark, completely dark, and I listened to the chaos around me as I just stared at that sky and waited, waited, waited, for the sun to come back.
It was a month before the moon reappeared in the sky. It started as just a tiny sliver, but even that much light on all our darkness caused everyone to catch their breath and allow themselves to hope. I went outside for the first time since the sun went down then, and stared at the moon. Everyone else was filled with relief, but all it did for me was bring tears to my eyes, as I stared at that grey light and missed the bright yellow light.
It took about a year for everyone to register that the sun wasn't going to come back, at least not in our lifetimes. The moon started out slowly but then seemed to switch on like a light switch, and suddenly there was real light in the sky again, if only moonlight.
Now, there wasn't dark and light, there was just the less-than-happy medium of moonlight that wasn't bright enough for the day and was too bright for night.
© 2011
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