Two days and precisely one night into the journey, I see god.

It’s approximately six in the morning. Craning my neck, my face catches an air conditioned sigh from the vents; the sky beyond the dust smudged window is a mellow gray fading into inchoate shades of blue. The world—at approximately six in the morning in Utah—is still.

My head knocks gently against the window, the sweeping view of the desert landscape stretching endlessly outwards. The scruffy plants anchored at the side of the highway smear into the red of the sand, their bristling limbs shuddering as the minivan hastens onwards.

My eyes track sparse patches of vegetation as the radio whispers in the background. The gentle susurration of words waft throughout the shell of the car and over slumbering bodies, the verbiage swallowed in languid inhales, being drawn into unsuspecting dreams. A banjo twangs, La Danse Macabre crackling faintly, muffled by a labyrinth of luggage.

The car grumbles onwards. The Graveyard Book filters through the car speakers.

“Sleep my little babby-oh
Sleep until you waken
When you wake you’ll see the world
If I’m not mistaken…”

An ache resounds through my limbs as I shift for the nth time. As I list to the side in resignation, a visor of orange turns my world white.

Through the windshield, a golden yolk breaks across the horizon. The silhouette of the sparse verdure set against the morning-dark landscape is instantly awash with russet ichor. Rays of effulgent scarlet and saffron leak onto the sand, spilling over the skyline, viscous like syrup. The sunlight appears to rend the very heavens asunder, spearing that feeble sky with a shaft of lustrous copper and saturating the earth with warmth. Orange floods the highway, the pavement gleaming liquid gold beneath travel-worn tires, radiance bathing the interior of the car with tangerine.

From inside, sunlight washes over me, lurid and overwhelming. Never before had I seen a sunrise of this magnitude before, never once believing that sunrises—that which signifies rebirth and hope—was for someone like me. Sunrises were not for people like me to gawk at—not the me who incessantly bemoans that I should never see the sunrise again. And yet, I feel intoxicated, as if I have lived a life sheltered in cloying, clinging darkness up until this point.

That sunrise lingered on the horizon, leaking vibrant vermilion into my eyes, branding that scene into my mind.

Two days and one night, precisely. Two days consuming musty stale travel and the occasional bag of chips. In a white minivan smeared in rufous dust, I hurtle towards the sun, my heart rabbiting wildly in my chest, my fingers tingling, feeling light. In Utah, a car rumbles along a barren highway and I look towards dawn.

“The midsummer sky was already beginning to lighten in the east, and that was the way that Bod began to walk: down the hill, towards the living people, and the city, and the dawn.”

Throughout my life, in times trying and bleak, that sun rises again within my chest. Petals of crafted gold and sunshine shudder in synch with my heartbeat, a kindling sun of my own. A new hope sparking in my chest, echoing the eruption of embers ascending into the vault of heaven. My very own god, who I saw after two days and precisely one night, last summer in Utah.

The Graveyard Book ends.