It was like a sun from another universe. Wreathed and shrouded in finely-spun fibres of cloud, it hung low over the western horizon just north of the brown humps of Soyea. The cloud cradling it was a deep purplish rose but the hue of the sun itself was hard to describe. Not orange, nor yellow, nor even gold, it was a colour from another world, and its texture too seemed of a softness too fine to be from ours.
I stood at the shore and watched it, this very gentle apocalypse happening somewhere else, and all the while a strange ache grew in my breast – a sense of things I couldn’t reach for, of distance without end. Meanwhile at my feet, the sea just kept sighing: surge, retreat; surge, retreat; surge, retreat.
Aird Ghlas, Loch Inver, Assynt, Scotland
19th March 2021