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Glaring Sun

 J sees me off by her metro station after dinner and tells me to text her when I reach my hotel. The roles have changed - she is young, strong and invincible and does not see me that way anymore. That was a very different time. I walk on to 37th  street and the setting sun lunges into the street wanting to eat us whole. The light is so blinding that I cannot look ahead. "What is that light, is it the sun?" I ask J and she laughs saying of course it is. I don't know what other answer I was expecting. 

There is water on the other side of the sun, I have been there a couple of times - its a nice walk. Today, it seems impassable with that dazzling light - it makes we want to turn away. The restaurant she had picked turned out to be a hot spot on Monday evening. We got on the waitlist but were too hungry to actually wait an hour. The place we ended up going instead was cozy and not overcrowded; quiet enough to talk. The food as great and the staff very friendly. She is in her element there, I am just passing through town.

When J first left home to go to college, leaving her was incredibly hard - I put on a brave face and pretended that it call came to me naturally. That place at the intersection of two streets by a big field of green where I waved goodbye in her freshman year, is etched forever in memory. I watched her turn to the street leading to her dorm and walked to the railway station. The stores and restaurants along the way were not all open yet. 

I committed the scenery to memory the best I could so I would be able to imagine where she was and then took my plane back home. J settled into her new life slowly - there were highs and lows but she impressed me with her resilience, specially through the pandemic. For the first six months it felt like I lived outside my skin at a constantly elevated level of anxiety that no rational thought could quell. Then time and distance did their work  - the anxieties started to dissolve. 

I can't recall her metro station where we parted ways after dinner nearly as intensely - she is a grown woman, there is nothing remarkable about that stop for her. She met me there because it was close to my hotel. The gaping sun is there every evening, she does not look at it like I did and wonder what that light is.

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