Chasing Sunsets and Other Impossible Things

It was a chilly afternoon in Kalibo. Colder than usual. So cold we had the windows down, and the scents of sea salt and sand invited themselves in.

“D’you like it?” I asked. Grant was beside me, in the passenger seat so backed up he had his feet crossed.

“Which one?” he replied, listless.

“Boracay, dummy. D’ya meet any chicks?”

“Fuck off,” he said, finally glancing in my direction before returning to the passing sea scenery beside us. “It was nice. Sand was really white, huh?”

“Told ya. We can scratch that off the bucket list.”

“Hmm.”

“Next up, Bakhawan Ecopark!” I said as cheerfully as I could, with no reply.

The open road was as quiet as him. Holidays usually meant the streets are flooded with old, fat white men flaunting their Filipina wives, but somehow today was meant for just the two of us.

“Got anything you wanna do in the hotel when we get back?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation going.

He took a while to think before saying, “Nothing comes to mind.”

“Not even anything… spicy?”

“I’m not feeling it, right now. I’m sorry,” he replied, not once meeting my eyes.

“Nah, nah, it’s okay. I was just kidding!”

He chuckled knowingly in return. A while passed by between us with nothing else said. We were comfortable enough together to have spent hours, at one time even days, without as much as a whisper. And so I thought everything was fine.

And then he sprung it on me.

“When I go, will you still love me?” he asked, and for once in this ride he was facing me and not the sea.

“Of course.”

“For how long?”

“For forever,” I said and smiled at him. And it was then that I realized forever wasn’t the answer he was looking for.

“You can’t do that,” he said.

“Of course I can.”

“No, you can’t. You shouldn’t.”

“Hey, can’t I get a say at what I’ll do when you’re gone?” I said as I chuckled nervously, a sad attempt at easing the rising tension.

“It’s what’s good for you, Nate. I’m thinking about you,” he replied, his voice limp again. Moments like these got more frequent as time passed; he’d either be cold and lifeless or too hot to handle.

I tried my best to be calm, and said, “Look, I get what this is about—”

“Oh, don’t start using that tone on me. Don’t treat me like one of your clients.”

I started gripping the steering wheel so tight I heard the leather squeal. “Look, what was it that you wanted to hear? That I’d, what, ditch you right after the funeral and get married to the next girl I see?”

He was looking away from me now, and it somehow hurt worse than his furrowed gaze.

“That I’d forget the last seven years in just a day, a month, or another god-awful year?”

He was quiet, still.

“Well?” I asked, finally letting loose. Let the dam break. A miniscule moment of weakness. A single syllable was all it took for me to realize I’d gone too far.

A pregnant pause sat between us for a while. It wasn’t the calm of an evening spent alone together, it was the anxious silence before a bomb blew off. It was the dull void of missing your flight, and you could do nothing but wait for time to painfully pass you by. It was stressful. Agonizing. Irritating.

He was the first to break the silence. “Stop the car.”

“No, I’m not stopping in the middle of nowhe—”

“Stop. The car,” he said, with enough finality to stop a storm. And maybe he did have one brewing in him then.

And so, I did. Parked by the side of the road in a long and empty stretch of asphalt, with a rice field on one side and bare grass on the other. As soon as I shut the engine off, he hopped out the car and slammed the door.

I gave myself a bit of time alone. To calm myself a little. To let the flood back in. To still my own storm. If I was honest, I would’ve admitted I was growing tired of it. Of enduring his outbursts, his tantrums. Tell him he was being a fucking asshole and that I’m just trying to make the best out of the shitty hand we got dealt with, and that the least he could do was thank me for it once in a while.

But now wasn’t the time for things to be about me. And I reminded myself of that. That what he’s going through is orders of magnitude worse. But if I could be honest, sometimes I disagreed. That maybe being left behind was worse than having to go in the first place.

But now wasn’t the time to disagree, either.

When I got out, I found him sitting pretty on the grass, not too far from the car.

I sat beside him, quietly. Wordlessly. Saving a few inches between us.

For a while, we stayed like that, and I felt the bomb defuse.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not taking his eyes off the sunset view.

“I know.”

“It’s—it’s just the stress of it, it’s just…”

“Grant. I know,” I said, gingerly laying a hand on his shoulder, testing the waters, and I felt his shoulders untense, his delicate muscles relaxing in my touch.

“I’m not backing down, though,” he said. The soft touch of sun was a spotlight for the tears welling in his eyes. “You should move on. As soon as you can.”

“Grant,”

“It doesn’t have to be today, tomorrow, nor the hour after they bury me—just…promise me,” he croaked. “You’ll find someone new. Someday.”

“I understand, baby,” I said, taking up the inches in between to hold him in my arms. “I do. I really do.”

I felt him grasp at my back and graze the back of my head with his fingertips. His bony, frail, fingertips. I had just enough strength in me to keep myself from falling apart, so I could at least hold him to let him crumble.

We stayed like that for a while until he let go.

“Thanks,” he said. “And I’m sorry. I was an asshole back there.”

I planted a kiss on his cheek. Where there used to be fullness, there was now skin held taut. “But I’m not backing down either, you know.”

“On what?” he asked, stifling back tears.

“On loving you forever. Or I can at least try. You deserve as much.”

All he did was smile, return a kiss, and lay his head on my lap. Quiet. The kind of silence we were used to, before all of this.

And again, he broke it first.

“What would you do if you could do the impossible?”

“Hmm… end world hunger.”

“Boring.”

“The great writer Milan Kundera once said, ‘To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.’”

“Booooooooring—wait, are you calling me a dog?”

I chortled. “Take what you may.”

The sun was beginning to set, now. The sky was lit a gradient of red and orange, with wisps of clouds shaded in all the warmest hues.

“I’d chase the sunset.”

“…Come again?”

“If I could do the impossible. I’d chase the sunset.”

I giggled a bit, thinking it was a build-up to a punchline. “And what do you mean by that?”

“I mean chase the sun, before it sets. See a sunset for half a day, or even a full twenty-four hours,” he said as he rolled his head to look up at me. And right then and there, I fell in love all over again. He was painfully thin, looked about frail enough to fold over from a cough, but his eyes then were the exact same ones I fell for all those years ago.

Not even cancer could take those baby blues.

“You think airplanes can catch up to the sun?” he asked, in childlike wonder. “A jet could do it, probably. I’d like to be faster than a jet, though.”

“Now that’s not a boring answer,” I said. And then, his eyes lit up.

“You wanna do it? Right now?”

“What?”

“Chase the sunset!”

I chuckled nervously. “Baby, we could trip over or something and—”

“Nah, come on!” he said, and it surprised me that he had enough strength to pull me up.

“Grant, I’m serious—”

“I am, too! Come on!” he said, and started sprinting. I kept pace.

I felt like a mother, then, nervous that her newborn could fall while learning to walk. But he looked happy. Happier than Boracay. Happier than he had been in months.

It could have been the dusklight glinting in my eyes, but I swear I saw him change, then. Just in that moment, of running in a field of grass, he wasn’t frail, nor sickly, nor thin. He morphed shape, shedded skin, tore off the illness and bore the warmth of the sun in himself. His arms were full again, his hair thick, his skin back to brazen bronze. He was back to himself, the version of him before the cancer, before the chemo, before we were ever told he had only months left to live. He was my Grant, as I’ll always remember him. Beautiful, strong—and dumb enough to try chasing a sunset.

He must’ve caught me staring, then, dumbstruck as I was. “You’re too slow, Nate, too slow! Sun’s already getting down!” and I heard him laugh. Fully, the kind that takes a full chest of air to let out.

Maybe there are impossible things, but for now at least, we’ll cross this one off the checklist.