Erb Garden

Remembering Sunsets (draft)

Behind my eyelids is velvety blackness. If I have been staring at a screen, the field is broken by a nondescript blob of light, the fading afterimage. With my eyes shut, I try to summon a familiar picture: an apple, any cultivar will do. But there is no apple, only the void.

I learned that people generally think in pictures when I was 32 years old. A friend mentioned having aphantasia; I looked it up online rather than admit not knowing a word. “A condition of reduced or absent voluntary imagery.” Its definition was the answer to a question I didn’t know I carried with me since childhood. That friend and I spent weeks comparing notes.

The “close your eyes and imagine a sunset” meditation during yoga class seemed metaphorical; I figured everyone around me was also thinking vaguely about the concept of a sunset, that is, if I thought at all about how they thought. It's only natural to expect other people to see things the way we do, literally and figuratively. This is the false consensus attribution bias - overestimating the commonness of your own beliefs and characteristics. We go through life assuming others operate similarly, until something challenges this understanding.[^1]

If pressed, I can list a collection of traits shared by many, most, or all sunsets: the sinking sun, the desaturating sky, the presence or absence of clouds, the yellow glints on reflective surfaces, the horizon either unbroken or augmented by trees or buildings or hills, and the gradual atmospheric dimming that begins slow and then happens all at once.

I remember watching a movie theater sunset sandwiched between trailers for upcoming features and the film itself. That sun dipped over a peaceful lake, crickets chirping and cattails dancing. A man said in voice-over, “I love sunsets." He was interrupted by a woman asking, “are you going to talk during the movie?” When he replied no, he was gently shushed. This couple appeared as silhouettes in the foreground, her head resting on his shoulder as the scene faded to black. The text “Thank you for not talking during the show” filled the screen. When I went looking for this, I learned that this exchange is now a piece of lost media, an artifact of the film reel era and out of place in a society where silencing phones took priority over silencing chatter. It has been preserved only in the memories of late-20th and early-21st century moviegoers from pockets of the midwestern United States.

I remember watching the sun descend beneath the arches and spires of St. Nicholas' Cathedral in 2019, mirrored in the windows of a Brutalist office block in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. My train from Edinburgh to London was departing the station just then. I took a photo; I took so many pictures on that train ride, of centuries-old stone walls and far off sheep dotting green fields. Shortly after, the trolley lady sold me a packaged watercress egg salad sandwich memorable only for its blandness.

I remember another especially captivating sunset I photographed in 2022: the high, peachy clouds rimmed with a gold glow and the low, lavender clouds capped pink. They filled a pale sky at the end of Mound Street, a sky nestled between brick apartments and gray houses, crosshatched with utility poles and power lines. This particular sunset was a silver lining of homelessness; I witnessed more breathtaking skies during six months living in a tent than at any other time in my life.

I cannot “picture” a sunset, but I have known sunsets and occasionally taken pictures.