Sunrise, Sunset

Every night, the boy looked up in the sky and directly out the window. He waited for the sun to set and the moon to rise. And he would always wake up early to wait for the sun to rise over the hilltops. Nobody knew why he did this, but they all knew that he never needed a clock to wake him up, somebody to come get him, or anything. He would just wake up and be compelled to watch the sunrise. And for the sun set? He was physically incapable of sleeping until he watched the sun set and the moon rise. Some say it’s a disorder, but him? He says it’s magic. He believes that if he misses ONE night of watching the sunset and moonrise, or ONE morning of the sunrise, he wouldn’t be granted inner peace. He continued to do this from childhood to adulthood. He had a wife and three kids. Each one of the kids did what he did. Even his wife took great pleasure in doing this. He never forced them to. He never even asked. They just did.

And something magical happened when the boy, now an old man, was dying. He smiled. Everyone around him was crying and he just smiled. His children saw this and smiled with him. His wife, too, saw this and did the same. They all turned their heads and looked out the window and surely enough, was the moon rising over the treetops. He can now, finally, fall asleep… in peace.