HELIOS | Sarah Piper

By now it’s like clockwork. Out of the corner of my eye, the sky begins to shift. Rays of sunlight slant low through the window, their light now glowing and rich. I pause every small thing I might be doing, the handful of dishes, a page of a book, an episode of some earnest Netflix drama. I am patterning myself in the sky’s time. It is my light, too; it waits.

Evening walks are easier than the morning ones. My morning body is slow to adapt, sluggish, leaden. It often can’t go far before it is exhausted. But at night, at least on good days, I am as upright as I get. Sometimes, when I’ve sufficiently convinced myself that life—death, too—is not just one thing, I might even find myself floating.

I slip on shoes and step into a cool evening. I close my sweater around me and realize I am breathing: wider, slower. I didn’t know before illness how much of me already belongs to the air. Songbirds sing their last notes of the day from behind late summer foliage, now darkened in evening’s slow transition. Crows stand guard over the last hours of the day, content to see, not sound, from their perches on overhead lines.

Because it is still August, I walk past the yard with the rose bushes and put my nose to every blossom I can reach from the sidewalk. There is less scent now than in June, when the residue of fragrance could carry me a half a block. Even the summer blooms too big, exhausts itself. Once, this would have seemed a small life.

Around the block, down an alleyway that faces west, there is a clearer sightline to the setting sun. I remove my glasses to let the light fully in. The neighborhood disperses its geometry as if slipping under water: an indistinct orange sky, blurs of greens on trees, patches of flowers like distant schools of fish. I pass the birch tree and touch its paper bark. Somewhere on a nearby street neighborhood kids play and laugh.

Around another corner, I arrive at the umbrella tree. It isn’t one tree but two, leaning their heads inward from opposite sides of the sidewalk. Together, they form an ample canopy that encloses the path, a dome of falling leaves. It would take only a few steps to walk into it and out again, but here, I always pause.

Though I once moved through my days oriented only to the purposefulness of ground, in illness, I am learning to look up. With my face skyward, the assumption of sidewalk steady enough beneath me, once fully enclosed in the mane of the trees, I begin to twirl. Slowly, then faster, the trees’ own stars emerge as patches of orange sunset flash and sparkle through the spaces between leaf and branch. I can see nothing distinctly. No lines, edges, clarity—nothing to answer my questions. I cannot see where shapes begin or end. Only these generous outbursts of light through dark, born and extinguished, born and extinguished—twinkling wondrously as I spin my body around the evening.

When I am done, I make my way home on purple streets.

There is some science that suggests this last hour’s light may be healing. That it travels the length of space from the sun’s surface, passes slant through our planet’s atmosphere, sets a pastel glow upon the undifferentiated spaces of sky above. It intersects with my retinae, where it might sail my brain toward a restorative sleep or conduct my cells in a kind of circadian symphony that could harmonize any discordant, unwell parts. Of course, I don’t know it to be true: that I will wake up tomorrow, healed in some part of me that is ill. These days, I try to be patient for possibility. There is nothing to lose in this long experiment, I tell myself. I try not to be too specific anymore about where I aim my hope.

So, for two years, every evening I’ve been well enough to do so, I have walked the block at sunset. When I wasn’t well enough I’d stand at an open door or window, if only for a few minutes, facing westward, imprinting my eyes with the embers of a low, red sun. Some nights, I’d keep looking until my eyes blinked and teared—or sometimes wept—determined to take in the light. Determined to be transformed.

Sarah Piper is a physician and writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through her own experience of illness, words became a favorite medicine. She is a participant in the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Poetry Project and has completed training in narrative medicine and contemplative medicine. Published work can be found in Yellow Arrow Journal.