The Sun Goes Down
There is a certain hour in a man’s life that feels like evening, even if the clock disagrees. A quiet hour. The sky does not fall, but it leans. Shadows stretch, not as threats, but as reminders. I can hear my own footsteps in that hour, even in a crowded place. I can hear my past. I can hear the version of myself I almost became.
The world has not collapsed. It has simply thinned out.
The noise is still there, but it sounds far away, like a conversation down a long hallway.
People still smile, still shop, still argue, still rush, but I see a kind of hollowness behind it, not in cruelty, but in fragility.
They do not know how close they stand to the edge of their own lives.
I have always known.
There is a voice in the song that speaks directly to that part of me, the part that survived, the part that broke, the part that kept going because stopping was never an option. It is not a heroic voice. It is a tired one. But it is honest. Honest in the way fog is honest, in the way silence is honest.
It says: The world grows dim, but you are still here.
It says: You have walked through worse nights than this.
It says: If the sun is going down, then stand with it.
Do not run from the dark.
Face it.
The song knows something about me, the years of improvisation, the Houdini escapes, the broken systems, the broken selves. It does not pity me. It does not admire me. It simply recognises me.
Because the song is not about defeat.
It is about endurance.
Not triumph.
Endurance.
A man standing on a ridge watching the last light slide off the land, not flinching, not begging, not performing. Just watching. Just breathing. Just staying. Because staying is sometimes the only rebellion left.
There is a pulse underneath the melancholy, a kind of heartbeat that refuses to die. A stubborn spark. The kind of spark I carried through all the Rorschach blots where I could have disappeared and did not.
The song knows that spark.
It builds its world around it.
The darkness does not frighten me.
Not anymore.
I have lived in darker rooms, darker thoughts, darker years.
Dusk is gentle in comparison.
And this is what you would feel if you met me, without ever hearing the music:
A man standing at the edge of the day, the sky dimming around him.
A man who has lived enough to know what endings are made of.
A man who has learned that light does not leave. It moves.
And he moves with it.
The song’s feeling is not sadness.
It is not nostalgia.
It is the quiet dignity of someone who has seen the worst and still stands with his hands in his pockets, watching the sun go down like an old friend leaving the bar.
There is no drama in this song.
No pleading.
Just the fading presence of the sun.
And presence, even fading, is the final victory.
(The song is "The Sun Goes Down" by Thin Lizzy, 1983)