The Sun

By: Sophia Rogan

The sun is light, creation, life, a beginning to a story with every end and none. Our greatest characters of myth are embodied by the sun, its warmth, and its flame. Old cultures revered their most powerful gods as divine, heavenly beings, holding the sun or embodying it. Take the Greeks, with Helios, Apollo, and more especially Zeus, and the Egyptians, with the mighty Ra, his grandson Horus, and the entirety of the Ennead. Many Mesoamerican societies considered their sun god to be the most important of the plethora they worshiped, giving offerings daily. The imperial family of Japan claimed to be descended from their sun goddess, Amaterasu, for whom they built their greatest shrine.
  It seems to be designed in human nature to chase the sun’s love. We chastise the moth for seeking a light it cannot have, but we’ve done the same to ourselves for thousands of years. And for some of us, we crave its affection so dearly, we’ll let ourselves be burned before we recognize it never had anything to give.
  My sun was a girl named Amina.
  Amina had hair with such thick, spiraling curls, your hands could only get lost in it. When she smiled, the room would go quiet with awe. Every professor praised and loved her. She walked in a way that charmed every passerby, and those hazel eyes of hers were hard to not get lost in.
She was a literature major, studying for her masters. I was halfway finished writing my thesis, with a career in archaeology ahead of me and hopefully an opportunity to move out of the country, to go live in Europe and away from this side of the world altogether. I kept to myself, got my work done, and tried not to glance her way twice, ever since I first saw her senior year of undergrad. I told myself I was just looking for a better WiFi hotspot when I began to sit at the window corner of the diner I visited each day, neighboring the coffee cart outside: the same coffee cart that Amina came to on her way through campus, at 8:15 sharp every morning, to order an oat milk latte, in which she always put an extra packet of sugar. Then, she’d always ask how the barista was doing, compliment her in the way she complimented everyone, and head west.
  Towards the beginning of the year, she’d taken a different route and entered the diner with a friend of mine, Leo Axton, who’d spotted me, and the morning quickly became a social brunch. Amina Ariti, with her cloud-shaped earrings and a yellow sundress, enthralled me with her sweet laugh and bright smiles.
  After that, I spent an entire month paying for her lattes, though she never knew who it was. When the barista finally confessed to who was handing her five bucks each morning, my diner visits suddenly became small dates.
  I spent six months with her. This wonderful girl that everyone adored, I think I might’ve loved. I, Amalthea Byrne, the scholarship student who minded her own and worked effortlessly to leave, was pulled into the sun’s light. She was known at every art studio in Cambridge, every library on campus; it felt as though the majority of Harvard’s students had come across this golden girl. I, admittedly, let her blind me when I stared too long.
  When they talk of the great gods, Zeus, Ra, Amaterasu, for example, they speak of their revered holiness and light, though they often forget to mention their faults. The sun, for all the love we give it, is not as perfect as we worship it to be. Amaterasu once hid herself away and cast darkness on the world; Zeus betrayed his wife and used his position to abuse his power; Ra created Sekhmet to massacre and slaughter.
  Maybe we were already on different paths. Perhaps, as the moon, I’d learned to bask in the sun’s light too long and learned to shine with her. But she never needed me; did she? Hoping and wishing for something to be of us was stupid. I never should’ve looked up from my laptop that morning, or seen her smile.
  By the next year, I was offered an opportunity to continue my studies in Greece. Amina could have come with me. I’d begged her to. Only, I had forgotten I wasn’t the only one who loved the sun, and the sun did not love me.
  I write this sitting in the third aisle on the bride’s side. She’s wearing the white dress I had once mentioned to her, during a time I had laid shoulder-to-shoulder with her in my Boston apartment. Leo is about to give her the ring I’d told her she’d like. Her smile is, just as it always has been, a radiant thing.
  Her happiness is my happiness. She is warmth, light, and an unattainable dream. We love the sun. The sun does not love us.