Carrying Sunsets

I recently travelled to a kindred soul to bid her farewell. It felt as though she had managed to find the most inaccessible property possible. I remember chuckling because we used to joke that we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if we weren't faced with a constant stream of marrow-powdering challenges. The weather report had warned of downpours the whole time we'd be there, but that didn't matter, I was going to be with her.

After I landed, I drove through the pouring rain along what felt like endless winding roads, it almost viscerally felt symbolic. I found myself reminiscing about the parallel journey we had shared over the past years. It had been a hard cycle, one of those that shreds your soul to pieces repeatedly, yet somehow you make it through. The truth was, I didn't really know how to say goodbye without saying goodbye. I knew she would remain in my life, but I also knew we each had our own diverging paths ahead. You could feel it in the air that she knew it too. As a final gift to one another to close this cycle, we decided to meet, to just be real together, to offer some brute-force honesty. As a final act of love, we chose to share the truths we both needed to hear. One last massive internal mutual challenge, to clear the debris, to leave behind that which we didn't want to bring forth into the next cycle. She has always been exceptionally skilled at ripping penetrative truths, yet somehow made you feel warmly understood while doing it.

When I pulled up to the property, the sky began to clear. The view was beautiful, overlooking a peaceful, quaint harbour through evergreen trees. My eyes almost felt healthier staring at it, a clean diet for the soul. I unpacked and slipped into a flowing dress. She had prepared music and placed candles on the outdoor table on the balcony. She has always been good at making others comfortable in her presence. We sat there together, admiring the view, unpacking recent events, what we call the "light-touch" topics, to ease ourselves in. We also giggled like two children, describing the shapes of the clouds above, while the trees swayed as if to our synchronised heartbeats.

When she went inside momentarily, I stood up and walked to the edge of the balcony. The sun was setting in one of those hyper-vivid high-definition spectacles, so beautiful and intensely vibrant in colour that you feel sheer euphoria just being in its presence, as though it is accosting your entire soul, and all you can do is stand there and take it all in. I paused for a moment to question if it was even real, because it shifted the atmosphere, and I felt its soul greeting my own. I thought to myself, this is what makes existing worth it. I realised no phone was ever going to capture the feeling of that exact moment, so I just stood there, absorbing everything I could in awe-inspired surrender. I accepted that I could not condense the feelings of that moment into words and simply enjoyed it for what it was, as it was. It was special, palpable almost, like I felt it was going to be one of those endless nights that held all eternity, because all eternity no longer mattered in the presence of that night.

Like truly special relationships, moments like these carried that "you had to be there" quality, because their essence cannot be relayed second-hand, not to the extent and depth at which you felt it. Lived resonance, the kind that feels as if it has its own spirit, cannot be fully transmitted, translated, distilled, reduced, or compressed, because words, however beautifully arranged or articulated, are too stripped of soul - of ambience, shades, gestures, touch, presence, pauses, melodies, gazes, and atmosphere. They are paradoxical, almost testimonies to their own insufficiency. In a way, words are reflections of first principles, where that which is expansive is boiled down into fundamentals, trying to fit the vastness of an entire living ocean into a single drop so that it is easier to transfer the crux, but ultimately futile in preserving the soul of the message because it must be felt, the journey lived, to comprehend the true depth of its wisdom. You can gesture it, but you can never bottle it, for it is not designed to be contained, it's just not within its nature. Thus, the most monumentally moving truths are often hidden in plain sight as near-cliché sayings. There is a latent polarity, an unassuming symmetry, to it all.

As I felt a tear trickle down my face, I glanced over and saw her leaning against the doorway with a peaceful, almost satisfied grin. That moment was special because it was in her presence, just as much as she was in mine - soul to soul, bare. It was my turn to be lost for words. All I could manage was, "thank you". She walked over gingerly, "cool, huh? And you're welcome". I stayed quiet, a little overwhelmed, and was glad I didn't fill the silence. After a meaningful pause, she added, "you know, I might not be good with words, but you're looking at it. This is how I say it, in my way". All I could do was stare at her with brimming eyes, furiously fighting back what was about to break through. She glanced down and admitted softly, "it is the hardest language to teach. I've been trying my whole life". Then, looking back out at the harbour, she said, "I can't get the words I want to out, like it is always on the tip of my tongue, but it just never comes out, or it comes out all jumbled". I realised that the unsaid sat at the threshold of her body as stress and anxiety, robbing her of the release and satisfaction I so readily enjoyed.

She communicated instead through ambience and presence, creating spaces where others could feel and experience what she felt. She was equally attuned and receptive to the unspoken subtleties and difficulties of those around her, drawing from a deep wellspring of empathy. That is why her presence soothed.

I thought of how this stemmed from a desire to communicate colliding with a sense of inadequacy, overthinking born of fear. She carried shame because at some point someone had made her feel that her words didn't matter. As a compensatory measure she found, no, she forged, her own language. Perhaps the truest language of the soul is one that doesn't need words at all, one that teases out somatic, lived presence. It is quietly tragic, yet also deeply beautiful, that even when she spoke, her words felt inadequate, never entirely satisfying, because words cannot capture her sentimentality, sensitivity, and all the layered depths of feeling she is capable of - they're too reductive for the endless expanse she carries. It broke me, and I cried into my hands. She sat with me, with misted eyes of her own. Perhaps I was releasing what she couldn't, and for those like her.

After a while, I mustered a half-convincing wide smile and said, "why speak the language of the world when you can teach the world to speak your language?" She smiled faintly and replied, "maybe".

For a moment, my mind drifted to another special soul who had recently shared a mirror event. Funny how life has a way of weaving layered symmetry, kaleidoscopic mirrors of mirrors, into our lives at exactly the right moments. In my mind's eye I saw them standing together, sharing a sunset too, gazing out into the distance with melancholic yet lucent faraway eyes. And then it landed in my heart - he had been speaking the same language all along. It had been right in front of me the whole time.

I pride myself on witnessing, yet I realised I had often been a poor listener in some respects because true listening is acceptance, not only to the person, but also to their language, the form or modality of their communication. I realised I had been deeply selfish in my approach. I was filtering what I'd received through my own language style, and because of that, even when I felt what was communicated, I didn't fully trust the form - or perhaps I second-guessed it. I didn't listen using my heart, somatically, when I should have. And in that moment, a cascade of realisations fell, because my heart finally trusted the feeling, the knowing, the ambience, and the resonance that I had been gifted with - and it was more than enough. I was my own source of uncertainty. It was then that I released the need to hear things in the way I wanted and instead accepted being a student of a new language two people I love shared, appreciating it for what it was, what it existed as. Sometimes, when you finally tune in and learn another's language, you realise they have been saying what you longed to hear all along, the whole time. That each word they spoke carried sunsets. It was at that moment, I felt myself receiving the full weight of their words, the endless worlds they held within, the formless knowing, and the feeling that existed ethereally, like hot air curling outwards and across cold glass. I think I understood love a little more.

I gazed back out over the harbour and smiled quietly to myself. Ambience honours feeling, they were both naturally fluent in the language of feeling and embodied knowing, as reflexive as breathing, yet curiously both often consciously denied that they were exceptionally gifted in this way. They carried it with a deep soulful humility, the kind that moves unannounced because it honours what just is, including the subtle ripples and shifts. I began reflecting on how transmuting what exists into words displaces us from our intuition, our knowing, and our instinctive felt sense even more. We switch from our default so often that most have allowed the verbose mind to hinder our connection to the soul, to what really matters. The beauty we see, but cannot put into words, the connections we cannot fully explain, are at the very core of our existence because they are felt. Some things are not meant to be named. Sometimes there is no metric, because there is no way to measure the resonance and depth of the soul. It is almost a little poetic that a language born of fracture holds the key to human wholeness.

I grimaced a little at myself, realising how my two great teachers had been showing me this all along, yet I had been too wrapped in my own rambunctious noise and sense of self to make room for what they had to teach to land. Humbling, to say the least, but we got there.

I gathered myself, trying to steady my breath very poorly, and asked, "how do I say goodbye that isn't a goodbye in your language? How do I say thank you for everything?" I wanted her to receive love in her own language. She paused, frowned slightly, and tilted her head, "I am not sure, I've never been asked". I broke eye contact because I felt my eyes filling again. I then hugged her, open-palmed, and held her closely for a few moments longer than the world usually allows. Then, I looked into her eyes and said with full soul-level conviction for the first time, "I get it. I get you".

Our gazes were caught by a smooth, low, immersive humming baseline - a track from the first music event we had attended together. She grinned, "song synchronicity", she said, repeating a phrase I had coined long ago. We both got it. And so, as the rain began to fall, we danced barefoot beneath the luminous eyes of a thousand stars, eyes closed, just letting the music move rhythmically through us. For a brief moment we opened our eyes, smiled at one another, and everything felt as though it was going to be alright. I realised then that we had said goodbye in her language.

Note: I don't usually write such intimate pieces, but she gave me her blessing for this one. It is my way of immortalising the love we shared in that moment, but even more so, my attempt at teaching her, and his, language to the world.