⟡ We Buried the Sun With Our Hands ⟡

The year the sun stopped rising, we were told not to look for God.

Everyone waited anyway.

The sky stayed bruised purple for weeks, like dawn was ashamed to show itself. We lit fires in the streets, burning memories instead of wood — trinkets, photographs, journal pages — until smoke tasted like the past. People swore they saw the sun kneeling beyond the horizon, head bowed like something grieving itself.

I was sixteen when my mother said,

“Help me dig. I think the sun died.”

We walked to the field behind the abandoned church, frost climbing our ankles like quiet teeth. She carried a shovel. I carried nothing but questions. There were others already there — men, women, children — all digging shallow graves in the earth as if waiting for something holy to fill them.

The ground was soft. Too soft. Like it had already been opened.

My mother knelt. Her breath trembled.

“If we bury what we’ve lost,” she said,

“Maybe the sky will forgive us.”

We placed everything we still remembered into the soil:

her wedding ring, my childhood drawings, the last jar of summer peaches. Someone buried the sound of their father’s voice. Someone else buried laughter. A woman sobbed as she laid down her own name, whispering it for the final time like a prayer slipping through fingers.

We covered the pit with dirt.

And waited.

Hours passed. Nothing changed.

People began to leave, shoulders collapsing under the absence. The field emptied until only my mother and I remained, bare-handed, dirt under our nails like guilt.

I asked her what she buried.

She didn’t answer. Her eyes were blank — clean — like someone who had traded memory for peace.

She no longer recognized me.

The sky cracked open then — not with light, but with sound.

A low wail, ancient and human.

The earth split where the grave was.

From the soil, something rose.

Not the sun — but a pulse, golden and wet like a newborn heartbeat. It throbbed against the twilight, casting just enough light to show every regret we tried to bury. They crawled out — memories shaped like moths made of fire. They clung to us, burning, forcing us to feel everything again:

The night father never came home.

The smile I refused to return.

The words she swallowed like sharp glass.

My mother fell to her knees, choking on recognition — and this time she looked at me with a pain so pure it glowed.

“We were never meant to forget,” she whispered.

And the heartbeat dimmed.

The sky stayed dark.

Only then did I understand:

We hadn’t buried the sun.

We’d buried forgiveness.

And the world would live without morning

until we learned how to love our wounds with daylight.