For a warm, deep turquoise to grace the sunset, the sun must bring his light just right – carefully, slowly, like fruit from a lovers lips – the brightest red, the sweetest skin, the greenest eyes. The waiting cloud must be ready to enfold him in her arms and take him, colors and all, against her breast, to comfort his journey; to lay him down, spent and satisfied, upon the violet horizon.
Under the lambent first-quarter wolf moon, her skin will glow with a color that exists in that moment and no other. Can you lay your face against it as you would against the sky? Can you taste the hint of strawberry left there by all the other sunsets?
It is time to wear the turquoise against my own breast as a talisman, as a wonderment, as an invitation to mortality. This will be my task. It is born of the earth, as am I, and holds the green of summer in a stone. The winters are there too, the times it escaped into the sky, all the times it left the moon hanging.
I can play my part, I am ready. Stone, sky, earth, moon. I bath in the sweeter, richer air that lies just above the ground, that holds my breath as I tremble against it, that sets my course, that fills me with all of the sunsets to come, whether drenched in turquoise or not.