I’m tired of abstraction. To say I was in my living room, laying in the afternoon sun, would be a horrible abstraction. Because what gets transmitted, by those words, into your head, are the vague ideas you have about me, followed by the vague ideas you have about living rooms, put together to create the generic scene of a girl laying in the sun. More details would make the scene less generic. But the issue is I don’t want this to be a scene at all. I want to transmit the specific feeling of this exact moment into your head. How do I transmit the sun into your head? Not the vague idea of the sun, but the real sun. We love to talk about dust particles floating in the sunshine. This image does a good job of capturing how quiet and delicate moments alone with the sun can feel. We often talk about how the sun warms our skin. This is a nice sensation to draw attention to. When combined with the dust particles, you get a better idea of the comfort and peace the sun can provide. I just moved to a new city, I do not have a job and I am waiting for my life to begin. These facts and this feeling of waiting lay with me in the sun. I think without words, “it’s nice that this apartment gets good afternoon sunlight.” I lay still on my floor for a while. I am not perfectly content. I ask myself why. I have cut up apples and a cup of green tea to my left. I live in an amazing city with my oldest best friend in a beautiful apartment. I get to do things like drink wine and wear makeup and kiss boys. My life is everything my younger self dreamed it would be. So I surprise myself when I softly say, to the sun and nobody else, “I think I miss being a kid with my brothers.” But I start to tear up and I know it is true. The moment isn’t any bigger than that. I think after that I got up. I moved through the rest of my day without noticing very much, both guided and distracted by the relentless prattle of the voice inside my head. Maybe this anecdote paints the sun as a reminder to ground yourself in the present. Or as set dressing, illuminating a young woman adjusting to a new chapter of her life. But I don’t want that. I want you to see the sun the way I saw it, and feel it the way I felt it. It was overwhelmingly bright, forcing me to close my eyes. Even still, I could see it through my eyelids, the typically blank darkness painted red and orange. In those moments spent laying, it was the only thing in the world. There was no living room and there was no me. There were no words. Just the sun, that shines forever.