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The apparition I see of her now is sitting on the swing set outside, wearing the cutoff jeans and peach tank top she wore the first time we met. I wait for her to turn around, to look at me and ruin the illusion my mind has created. She hasn’t done it yet (she seems preoccupied by swinging back and forth), so all I see is the pink sunset reflecting off her sleek blonde hair. But she will turn around, eventually. It’s inevitable, just like the cycle of day that causes the halo of pink wrapped around her head. Now that I think about it, Alaska (the real Alaska, not the ghost) was the same way. As surely as the sun will set and day will turn to night, I knew, from the moment I met Alaska Young, that losing her was ineluctable.
When I first saw Alaska, she was all light: pale skin, blonde hair, light-coloured clothing. She was fluorescent; she shone across great distances. She lit the way for my path through Culver Creek like the sun lights the way for anybody who needs it. She was beautiful, a spectrum of colours spanning the pale hues found in the sky at dusk. When she lit up that first cigarette, and I saw the smoke curl in gray tendrils around her face, I saw how it was her pollution that refracted into the colours about her, not her own colourful radiance. Once you reach sunset, the poisonous molecules constantly in the air mask their own destruction and display to the outside observer something they desire to see. Alaska’s self-destruction made her exactly what I desired to see.
As time went on, she sunk lower. She became darker. The light that used to exude from her entire being faded slowly, until it was so far away none of us could find it, even though it had been there a moment before. A sunset moves forward (always forward) and it never stops, much like Alaska could never hit the goddamned brakes. A sunset never weaves in its straight and fast path across the sky. Alaska’s car slammed straight and fast, jack-knifed into the cop car and –poof— she was out of the labyrinth and into the night. She went dark instantly.
In the time I knew Alaska Young, she went from being the sunlight I longed for, to the pale pink and gray-tainted sunset I loved, to the dark night that I realized I didn’t even know. I’m left with shadows of ghosts of an enigmatic sunset. Remember, remember the 11th of January, the day the sunset I wished was mine hit nightfall and vanished forever.