(Photo Credit: Sue Vincent)

Heraclitus of Ephesus, the well renowned pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, once famously said, “you never step into the same river twice.” Venky was wondering why the master philosopher did not include sunsets within the ambit of his thinking. No sunset was ever the same. Each sunset had its own meaning and majesty; its own purpose and passion; its own anger and anxiety. Hence as you never step into the same river twice, so you never glimpse the same setting sun twice.

This evening was no different. Sitting on a cold and stony bench fenced off from the edge of a brooding precipice, Venky tried to decipher the deep message emanating from the plummeting orb of orange. To the right of the bench was a board hammered on to a makeshift pole. The faded letterings on the board unimaginatively read “Sunset Point.” The contrast was clinical and unmissable. An explicit reference to an object struggling to comprehend the implicit philosophy being conveyed by the referenced object itself. A tussle between the simple and the surreal; the dilemma of mere enjoyment versus methodical enlightenment.

Today it was the brightness of the Sun wrestling with the darkness in his mind. The imperial dignity of the undulating mountain ranges was totally lost on Venky. Instead his focus was on an amoeboid bank of cumulonimbus cloud. A reluctant tendril, the cloud represented a lost child wandering aimlessly in search of its parents. Had the parents abandoned the child leaving the bewildered human to its own fate? The sun seemed to be focusing all its brightness, energy and empathy on the cloud. The resplendent brightness bathed the cloud in a hue of angry Orange.

He was the cloud. A cloud that was divested of ideas and devoid of intuition. He was a mere shell whose inner core was wrenched away in a moment of sudden madness. His hollow self merely resonated with the sound of lost memories. Memories of Ash, his very own Ash who like the myriad sunsets had transformed from his delight to his despair; who from once being a radiant light of hope had disappeared from him leaving him with a cold dark future of hopelessness.

But this evening the Sun strongly urged him not to lose hope; to keep dreaming. For every insipid dusk will invariably be followed by an inspiring dawn.

Wait he will. For his ASH.

This is a response to the #writephoto Prompt – Setting curated over at Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo. Click on the link to read other stories inspired by the image.

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