Orange is its most beautiful now. Only when bluesky daylight begins to rest its lashing flail to concede night's cool hand does orange become anything but oppressive. Nature is painted on the sky, "Perfect and unique enough to be the colored map of my soul," you think. Even though you learned from Copernicus, you know that the sun will never again trace the sky like this.
Oh wait, that view is just a memory and the only orange you see now is of the smoldering paper stick protruding with offensive certainty from stained fingers connected to a pair of sunken cheeks. They sink deeper and the embers grow brighter in mocking similarity to the divine display that hasn't left your mind's eye.
Your eyes meet as he takes the first pull. You are annoyed but it is not your consciousness that feels the grate. It is the writer of this very poem, the rememberer of this very memory who will recall that this was the first time when you understood that even lifelong friends are not protected by the strength of your relationship. Nor does the sky just before night throw its divine beauty on you with anything stronger than light.
Your eyes return to the orange scene, which is now just that. It isn't heaven. It isn't beauty so deep that it assures anything more than a lingering stare. When you turn your back, you will find the concrete world again. Beauty that could have justified god will not protect your lungs unused to anything more than backyard ping pong games with five bucks on the line.
The sting of the smoke stays in your nose and reminds you that the sun has set on mortal boyhood friends before and it will do it again.
The sunset's false blanket abandons the smokey air and burning leaf smolders in paper pointing at a liminal horizon, bright on top and dark below in a flat smirk tipping sarcasm towards two watchers, both mortally mortal, locked within the paradox of youth.
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