This City

Revere Beach

Yesterday the sun set in the east.

It was not unprecedented. It’s happened twice before, at least. My mother saw it happen in 1979, and my cousin’s girlfriend’s best friend’s grandfather says he saw it in 1944, when he was just a child.

Everything seemed normal that morning, of course. The trouble started around eleven thirty. The sun stopped in the sky and just hung there. It was hard to notice unless you stood in the same spot for a while, but it did happen.

By noon, everyone had realized, and we all knew what was going to happen. The people who saw it in `79 or `44 talked about it. Some of them were excited. Some of them were apathetic. None of them were scared, though, and because they weren’t scared, none of us – their children – were scared either.

At twelve thirty, the sun started moving again, in the opposite direction.

I don’t know why the sun reversed directly above us, and not over Kansas or L.A. or the ocean or China, but it ended up stopping right over the east coast, and I can’t say I mind too much, honestly, because it was a sight to behold.

I took the train to the beach. I wanted to see the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean. I waited there all day, watching as it crawled across the sky. I occupied myself by walking the beach back and forth. It was the middle of November, but it felt like late September. I waited.

On most days, when you caught the sunset at Revere Beach, the sand looked pink, the waves seemed green, and of course the sky was always just amazing. I would usually watch the planes coming out of Logan. Sometimes they would be really low in the sky, lower than I’d ever seen a plane before, but they would slowly rise and rise and rise until they were out of sight. The sun would set behind me, but I’d always watch the ocean instead – the darkness would creep into the sky from the horizon, slowly, like a plague.

Yesterday, though, the sun set in the east. I had never seen anything like it. “I bet this is what it looks like on the west coast,” I said to no one in particular, and then smiled, because no one on the west coast had ever gotten to see the sun rise and set over the same beach.

It started to grow dark behind me. The high rise apartments looked sinister.

At some point – though I couldn’t tell exactly when - the sun stopped again.

I waited. Nothing happened. The sun was divided in half across the horizon line. The plague of darkness had stopped in its tracks. I waited. Was the sun going to reverse directions again? There was no way of knowing. I waited some more. I waited for what felt like forever. Eventually I realized that I couldn’t stay, that it was getting late and I had to catch the train home. “I’m sure it’ll be fine in the morning.” I stared at the horizon until the train went underground, and when I came back up the sun still hadn’t moved.

Today, the sun didn’t rise at all. It’s still frozen in that exact spot, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve heard reports that it’s directly above some parts of Greenland and Africa, but that doesn’t matter much to me. It’s dark here.

Life still has to go on, at least for now. I still have to go to class tomorrow. People still have to go to work. There’s no national emergency, at least not yet, even though no one knows when the sun will start moving again. They hope that it’s very soon, or else we’re going to have to do something. The darkness could kill all of the plants. We could all freeze to death. There’s no way of knowing what will happen, really.

As far as I’m concerned, though, whatever comes next was worth it.