Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It’s like a slow summer dusk.
Jorge Luis Borges

My heart’s in the HighLAnds, my heart is not here,
My heart’s in the HighLAnds, a-chasing the deer;
Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the HighLAnds, wherever I go.
(…)
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the HighLAnds forever I’ll love.
Robert Burns

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At sunset, an overlooked hue separates the oranges of day from the dark blues of night. Let’s call it the ozone green. In the upper sky, ozone absorbs the warmer wavelengths, deepening the blue. Near the horizon, light’s long path through dense air scatters the blue away and leaves orange. In the band between, the faint, neglected green remains.

At the bottom of the eye is a spot, yellowish like the sun itself. The pigments protect it from focused light. I’ve looked at the sunset long enough, so I close my eyes to give the spot some rest. I imagine, with a close-eyed smile, that the sun also rests from the world below the horizon.

The world, you see, is an eyeball. And if you don’t, don’t worry. You are the eye and the world. The eye (and the world) cannot see itself. In this cosmogonic excursion, I envision the ozone green as the edge of the skeyelid that the setting sun pulls toward the horizon. When it closes and the darkness ensues, the phosphenes of stars begin to seep through the firmament.

I open my eyes, hoping that my eyelids will pull the sun from behind the Verdugo Ridge. That the orange of daylight will spill over the green again and the sunset will repeat itself. In vain. Something ends, and something begins. Everything in between, everything in transition, is immersed in the ozone green. I am immersed.

The wind plays with the costapalmate fronds of a lonely sabal palm tree. Their straight, blade-like lines cross each other, confusing my visual system. My mind wants to uncross them, surgically, like jackstraws.

I turn from the fading ozone green and walk slowly towards the outlines of dusk-covered San Rafael Hills. First, I hear the engine of his muscle car. Then I see my shadow in his headlights. I extend my arm and cross my fingers in a random gesture. It’s neither a V nor a Spock sign, but straight lines of fingers crossed like costapalmate fronds. His long arm extends towards the phosphenes of stars in a farewell wave. A moment later, only an engine roar echoes from behind the hills. A faint aura drags behind him, or maybe it’s just bougainvillea smeared for miles along the road. Maybe they are one and the same thing. Los Angeles. Of all the people I’ve met here, I’ll miss him the most.

I’m almost at my car when a coyote runs across the street to disappear in a dark slit between the hedge and W-beam guardrail. I peek over the rail and can’t fathom how she could run down an almost vertical slope. Then I notice a narrow, overgrown trail traversing the cliff. I see the coyote as she vanishes in the ravine below.

Dogs chase squirrels and I chase coyotes, an instinct I naturally picked up while jogging the streets of Pasadena and San Marino. I bushwhack down the trail. The coyote must have heard me breaking the brush. She waits curiously, our eyes cross, and she leaps into a burrow in the slope. I approach it carefully. I turn on the torch in my watch and look into the dilated pupil of earth. Two amber dots flash in the light. I once crawled into a huge treetrunk cave to film vampire bats, so this one doesn’t feel that scary. I hunch forward to avoid getting entangled with the roots and then I trip. The last thing I see is a pair of amber dots above me. They are getting smaller and smaller. I am in a free fall. The light from the outside fades, like a slow summer dusk.

Everything is in the dark. The light in my watch is useless, the hole must be hundreds of meters wide. Falling isn’t terrifying when there is no visual reference. All I feel is the airflow around my back. I track the hours passing on my wrist. Then it dawns upon me. A feeling, a conviction, more than a thought. This tunnel will carry me to the other hemisphere. After a decade in a place where the sun settles in its final location, I am falling back home. With little else to do in the dark, I pass the time compiling these adventurous reports, finding names for all the states and emotions, paying homage to people and places. All before a fox burrow spits me out somewhere in the flat forests of the old world.