sunset, in the east.

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it ...

The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old."

Jack Kerouac, the final page from On The Road.

I took this picture the day I arrived on the East Coast. I thought I was staring out at the Atlantic. 

Never had my move felt bigger than in that moment. Even the sunset had changed. Or really, I had changed. The sun stayed the same, as a marker of my course. I pictured a dotted line across eleven states, the entire country separating my past and present. Was "start" the place I was standing, or the place I was coming from? 

I waited for the sun to disappear without setting. I waited for it to go ... somewhere. But instead it kept glowing and falling, until it tucked behind the water. I was sitting over an inlet. 

I was still facing West.

(photo) iPhone | on a "broke down river pier in New Jersey," just like Jack.