bleeding sunlight

It's eight thirty and the sun is still up. It's almost gone, but you can just see it in how its light reflects off the sky, dyeing it a cool, calm kind of blue.

It's eight thirty and for the six of us Singaporeans walking alongside the cemetery on Grove Street it's still seven. Bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, we don't really believe it. Just a day ago the sun set at seven and rose twelve hours later, and its light meant sweltering heat and not chill. "I can't believe it," says one of us, and it resonates.

The cemetery gate rises above us and someone reads aloud: "The dead shall be raised." And in this moment even though everything is so surreal right now, it's nothing but truth. Quite suddenly, time has become irrelevant. We have become displaced, halfway across the world in a space where the night is bright, where the dead rise with the sun, where everything is possible.

(Written in ~15 minutes during a Writing History and Nonfiction Narrative class with Edward Ball, 2 June 2014)

("Time has become irrelevant" is not an original phrase. My sister said it on the plane.)