one thousand sunsets
in another life, i had one more day with you
content warning: grief, death, mention of terminal illness
this piece was written over a stretch of a period of time so apologies for the inconsistencies you will certainly find lol.
i would recommend reading my 100 days post first, if you haven’t :)
the first sunset after you left was all shades of wrong. bandung was soft that evening — cool air, slow traffic, the faint sound of motorbikes weaving through the fading light. the city felt like it was holding its breath. i remember the way the sky burned gold at first, then thinned into orange and grey, and it was so beautiful it made me ache because it shouldn’t exist when the world has fallen apart. still, the light kept reaching, as if it hadn’t heard the news.
a thousand sunsets since then. some i watched alone, some i missed entirely. some i watched with my head resting on the shoulders of friends you have never met. the world kept turning, as it does, and somehow i learned to keep turning with it. there were evenings on trains, the sky bruised purple over the north of england, and i thought of how you’d love the quiet between cities. sunsets from the student union’s balcony, as i work through my evening shifts, into the darkness of the night. there were nights when the sun didn’t set until ten, and mornings when winter light felt too thin to hold.
some of them, i remember particularly well. drenched in the colours of you. but i want to show you. can i?
sunset 217 — framwellgate bridge, durham.
walking home at four in the afternoon, or is it evening now. i’d been up since dawn for an early shift, still wearing the faint smell of coffee and dish soap on my hands. i packed my lunch for the day, cold when i ate it in the staff break room. second year of university felt like trudging through thick fog — work, classes, extracurriculars, and all my grief all blurring together. i stopped by the river that day, the one that cuts through the city, quiet and grey. it was the second anniversary of your cancer diagnosis. i didn’t mean to think about it, but the sky turned pink so suddenly, like a wound reopening. the water reflected it, gentle and aching. i stood there for a long time, until the chill started to bite at my fingertips.
sunset 255 — royal albert dock, liverpool.
here we are, in a city you loved. aric was here to see the anfield stadium. we walked through them, the ghost of you heavy on our steps. the sky that evening was a deep, molten red, and it stained everything it touched. your absence bled across the river, scarlet and unrelenting. it was almost winter solstice, the world darkening too early. in the air, your laughter in old recordings, your voice when you talked about this city as if it were alive. i thought maybe standing there, where the water meets the sky, i could almost find you again.
sunset 375 — marina barrage, singapore.
a cloudy one over marina barrage. the skyline restless beneath the dim sky, planes crawling toward the horizon. i sat with the wind wrapping around me like an old song. singapore — the city you trusted to hold me in the cradle of its hands. i remember thinking how right you were. i had been cared for here, my wings flapped open. and you were able to watch.
sunset 430 — river thames, oxford.
the sun setting low and late into the evening, it was nearly 9:30pm and the world was golden. i didn’t know it then, but that summer was going to save me. i’d been in pieces for so long at this point, worn down by the world, but the coming summer was about to stitch me back together. from the friendships that bloomed, the sense of self-purpose, the late night laughters. maybe it was always meant to be here — in this city i once wanted so badly to belong to. i still remember the first time i came to oxford, with you. we wandered its old streets, and i thought if i could just find a way in, into its colleges, its language, its rhythm, i’d finally become someone you’d be proud of. funny how time works. i never truly belonged to this place, not the way i thought i would anyway, yet years later, it became one of the places i was the happiest in the past thousand days. and you weren’t even there to see it. but maybe, thinking back to the warmth of the setting sun hitting my face that evening. maybe you were there after all.
sunset 621 — the castle, durham.
a december afternoon. the cold bites through my scarf. the sun low and pale by three, bleeding faintly through the frost. i was in the castle, writing the first thousand words of my dissertation about the world you once introduced me to. about ruin and hope, life and decay, kindness and power and greed. i didn’t realise then that i was also writing about you. it is all for you, isn’t it? all these words. i walked home through the bridge that evening, the cathedral glowing faintly in the dark, and thought of you.
sunset 623 — rare birds bookshop, edinburgh.
if you were still here, this would’ve been your 47th birthday. i went to edinburgh to hush the ache that came with that knowledge. i thought maybe if i sat among its cobblestones, watch its skyline, wallow in its melancholy, i could meet you halfway. i spent the afternoon in my favourite bookshop, and watched the winter light tremble through the window. outside, the sky dimmed early, folding into blue, and i thought of how much i wanted to be here with you. pick a book or two to bring to you, just like i used to when i was much, much smaller, and the world was much, much bigger.
sunset 696 — north road, durham.
my twenty-first birthday. i was breaking my fast at dinner with shoaib, though here the sky carries no call to prayer. the first stars were appearing in the sky when the message came: shortlisted for the national student publication association’s award for outstanding commitment. i thought of you then — of where i might have learned such devotion, such unrelenting love for words. it all came in a rush. you building me my first blog when i was five, showing me how to upload the stories i could barely spell. you reading every one of them proudly. you taking me on a train across jakarta once, saying that a writer must always look closely at the world. at that table, freshly twenty-one and full of light and longing, i wished for no one else to tell this news to, but you.
sunset 742 — asian civilisation museum, singapore river.
this is one of my favourite spots, did you know? it was a melancholic sunset, and i watched it with a friend you never got to know. somehow, i keep finding myself in this city — enamoured by the way the gorgeous sky hits the skyline, by how light bends over glass and water. we’d walked here once, you had taken me through clarke quay, along the river. i still remember your hand, steady around mine, the air thick and sweet. the city has changed since then, and so have i, your absence deep inside me like an open wound.
sunset 824 — durham cathedral, durham.
graduation day. sunlight spilled all over palace green, and i was giddy, dizzy with the how beautiful the day felt. it was all over, a bachelors degree to my name, and you were not there to see it. it was quiet and solemn in the cathedral, and they called my name with yours, and under the watchful eyes, i wish you were one of them. do you remember when i turned 11? i woke up with a silly amount of hogwarts acceptance letter in my room you and mum made for me because i had loved harry potter more than anything then. ten years later, standing in the durham cathedral cloister that became hogwarts on screen, i felt that strange tug of full circle. you once filled my room with magic; now i was standing in the closest thing to it, in my graduation gown. i lifted my face toward the thin summer clouds, and searched for you. it had been cloudy when the sun sets that night, unusually cold for early july. i closed my eyes on the taxi home, and thought of how much i wished i could run into your arms, when i exited the cathedral after the ceremony.
sunset 877 — the racecourse, durham.
end of summer. alone. unemployed and unmoored, and i was lost, my heart heavy and hollow. the summer heat was thinning, the air soft with its last warmth. i sat by the river and watched the water shimmer with the dying light. it should’ve been beautiful, but i felt so cold. i didn’t know what to do, so i just sat there for hours until all the light was gone. i missed you, and i wished you were here to me what in the goddamn world i’m supposed to do now.
sunset 891 — soekarno-hatta international airport, jakarta.
jakarta, humid and sprawling beneath me. at last. i landed feeling scraped raw, worn thin by my month of isolation. i needed the city’s heat, its impossible weight, the way the air sits close to my skin like a memory. for the first time in a long time, i was here without a return ticket, and the freedom tasted like freefall. i didn’t know who i was supposed to be now, or which version of myself was waiting for me on the other side of the arrival gates. the sunset that evening was the same polluted gray and orange i grew up with, soft around the edges, swallowed by haze. from the car, i watched it disappear behind the skyline and felt something in me loosen. i’d seen this exact light so many times before — half-asleep in the backseat in the car, on the way home after going with you to work, the world blurring past in warm colours. for a moment, just one moment, it felt like i was slipping back into that version of myself: small, safe, drowsy, and certain you were only an arm’s length away. so i exhaled, closed my eyes, and pressed my cheek to the car window. this is the closest i can get to you now.
sunset 911 — home, depok.
exactly at sunset, just as the call to prayer drifted through the house, the rejection email arrived. the dream job, the one i’d carried with me for a couple months at this point, the one that had felt so close i could already imagine the london air on my skin, slipping out of my hands. i told myself it was for the better, that i was meant to stay home a little longer, that timing was a kind of mercy i didn’t yet understand. but still: the sting. the old familiar spiral. if not this, then what? if not here, then where? as the last of the light faded outside, i prayed and thanked god for the chance, for the clarity, for the reminder that i am held even in disappointment. after my al-fatihah for you, i laid back on my prayer mat and cried, and cried, and cried, until the sharp edges softened into a dull ache, and i found enough breath in me to rise again. the next morning, we drove to bandung. i sat by your grave and told you everything, and somewhere between my quiet rambling and your silence, the ache loosened its grip.
sunset 975 — undisclosed location
in the car on the way to the airport, the clouds brewing a storm in the distance and the sky is darkening. i’m carsick. heartsick. bile rising in my throat. i went back to the city you grew up in, despite swearing i never would. the streets felt like foreign land, and i was grateful for it. i didn’t know them and they didn’t know me. that distance felt like mercy. but the house knew you, and inside, time had been suspended. your oxygen tank, your crutches leaning where they were last abandoned. your quran and belt laid out as if you had simply gone for a walk. the calendar on the desk still open to february 2023 as if april never came. there was nothing for me in that house. they have turned their back on me on that fateful night. my best memories of you do not live there. they never did. they live elsewhere, in motion, in warmth, in the years before everything fell into ruins. i feel carsick. the road lurching, my stomach turning, the horizon blurring. i left and did not look back.
sunset 988 — jurong east, singapore
i moved back to singapore five days ago. it feels almost predictable now, really, this city as a constant magnet, pulling me back no matter how far i wander. sunsets here always move slowly, stretching the light thin before letting it go, and i stood still long enough to watch it all happen. today, you would’ve turned forty-eight. everything in this city has aged since the version of it i knew with you. my office is in clarke quay now, and i think of you every time i watch the river, the mornings we spent walking there, taking photos, almost ten years ago. and i’ve aged too. almost twenty-two, carrying a life i didn’t know how to imagine back then. everything keeps moving forward, except you. you remain fixed somewhere behind me, unchanging, while the garden city and i keep returning to each other like this is how it was always meant to go. the sky slowly turns into black, and you are still forty five.
sunset 1000 — bukit timah, singapore
i am still at work. i have been all week, watching the sun go down from the uncomfortable chair i’ve been residing in while waiting for the students. my body moves on autopilot, a choreography of a life continuing whether i am present in it or not. and the city settles into evening, the sky thinning from blue into something dimmer. there is nothing remarkable about it. and that, somehow, is the point.
a thousand sunsets have passed now — some happy, some sad, some mind-numbingly beautiful, some achingly mundane. i have watched them end in cities that held me gently, and in moments that nearly broke me. i have counted them the way one counts breaths during pain, just to know i am still here.
the strange thing is this: the sun rises every single morning after. relentlessly and without ceremony. i wake up into days you are not in, and i live them anyway. i wake up early and shower. i go to work. i chug my coffee down. if i didn’t know better, it is almost as if nothing has changed. but i know everything has.
and so we find ourselves at the end of 2025. another year sealed shut without you in it. the calendar moves forward with the same authority as the sun, and i follow, even when i don’t know where it’s leading. i carry you with me like a second spine, invisible and heavy. but you hold me upright through days where i felt like i had to crawl to get through them.
in another life, i have one more day with you. just one. a morning where you are still here, the warm light washing over you through the window, and i don’t yet know what i am about to lose.
but in this one, the sun sets over and over again. a thousand sunsets have passed. and you are not here.
“But grief compels me, maybe even more than sleep. I am waiting for something to last. I know nothing will.”
— Sanna Wani, Who Is the Sun, Asking for Sleep?