Vancouver, British Columbia
The sky is vaguely flesh-coloured tonight, or at least the slice of sky I saw walking out of the building after work at 3AM. Then, driving home, the sky was a fuzzy grey — the colour of velvety stainless steel — and, to the south, just above the horizon, there is an orange glow the colour of dawn. There is a mid-night dawn in the sky.
A few months ago, I read a book about the history of artificial light, and that was when I first began paying attention to the colour of night sky, and that the “colour of night sky” ought to be an oxymoron, because night ought to be dark and darkness is the absence of light and without light colour is naught, is not.
There was true night in Hawai’i. Not just sights made possible by true night — the Milky Way, craters on the Moon, the glow of Halema’uma’u — but also night itself. Darkness. The lovely lanai and lawn and palm trees and ocean view of our cozy bed-and-breakfast vanishing into utter nothingness. The feeling of being compressed and set apart. The recognition of smallness.
Since coming back, I have stumbled into the habit of always taking a moment to observe the sky when I get home at night — just that brief moment in between opening and closing my car door. I struggle to describe the colour: it’s muddy but not brown, dirty but not black. It’s bright, glow-y, less like night and more like obscured-day. It’s grey-blueish-purple, a tasteless mix like out-of-focus static. It’s the colour of rock ground up into an impossible texture of vaguely viscous powder.
That orange glow, though, is new. I think. I remember hearing on the radio yesterday morning about meteorites and comets. That must be it, or at least I hope so, otherwise it’d mean I’m so sightless that I’ve been seeing-without-seeing that mid-night dawn for a decade.
Either/or, I suppose I will find out, in between the opening and closing of future car doors, when I look out into this nightless night in which absence is absent, and the world is the colour of a drawn-out apocalypse.