Sunrise
Roselle Chen

We were sitting on a pier, legs dangling over the water. I smelled salt in the air, the kind that sticks in the back of throats if breathed too deeply. The sky was light gray, with a few pink splotches here and there. "I've never seen the sun rise before," I said, and looked at him, my eyes feeling heavy with sleep slipping off and gathering into the corners. He said, "Shhh…just look". So I waited… with eyes that wouldn't completely open, a mind that dozed…from pink clouds…to cotton candy…soft… toilet paper… quilted… sheets… bed… sinking… into… quilted toilet papered clouds… "Hey!" My head snapped up. I saw the sun, a small dark orange ball. If I closed one eye and put my hand out, I could cover it. It looked like the yolk of an egg. As it rose little by little, it was poked with a fork and the yolk bled into the sky. Dark orange, red yellow, blue purple ran from the yolk. For a while they were separate. Each color its own. Purple on the horizon, gold tinged pink in the middle, darker blue on top of that. But as the bleeding yolk rose, it split apart and the colors mixed. I looked at it until I couldn't anymore, when the spots from the sun shone like mirrored rectangles every time I blinked. He asked what I was thinking, my eyes shifted to him and I didn't say anything. I couldn't say "how beautiful," or "amazing"—those words caught like dry granola in my mouth. I licked the salt from my lips and lifted my palms, dried splintered wood stuck in the elastic crevices of my skin. He took my hand in his and we sat there, fingers laced. The air was saturated like a wet towel, and our hands became beaded with tiny drops of moisture.

© Roselle Chen