The tweet that convinced me to make the trip to watch the eclipse.

the lead up was intense. when I first noticed there was a small occlusion on the sun, we were walking back over from the stream (where two friends had done a cold plunge), and heading back towards the grassy area to setup a blanket and watch the eclipse. I looked through my glasses and I saw that a small part of the sun was blocked. that was a “holy shit” moment – like okay, this thing is actually happening.

Our viewing area in upstate New York.

then it was slow. we found some patch of grass to sit on and just sat there for a while, having our sandwiches, looking at the shadows and noticing the crescent. there was a cute couple near us who had brought one of those contraptions (well, he had actually 3-d printed it himself) with a bunch of holes so that you could see the crescent in the shadows. the entire partial eclipse was about an hour and a half, so we spent a solid 45mins or so just hanging out and waiting.

The shadows cast during the partial eclipse.

as we got closer and closer to totality the intensity built up. first of all it got very cold. the sky was still fairly bright – it just looked like an afternoon with cloudy skies, but it was very cold and very breezy. there was a moisture in the breeze too, which made it very unusual. colors were weird. like, the closer we got to totality, the more it felt like there was some kind of instagram filter on everything. the crowd got increasingly excited as the sliver of the sun behind the moon was getting smaller and smaller.

I’m trying to remember the moment we crossed into totality. I had so much expectation and anticipation for it that it’s hard to distinguish expectation from reality. but it got quite dark (not pitch black, which I had been hoping for it to get), and then we looked up at the sun without our glasses and it was a giant dark hole with a fiery white corona around it. I was in shock, honestly. that’s probably why it’s so hard to remember. I was struggling to “hold on” for life, hold on to the moment. maybe the fact that I was taking a video made it harder. the video doesn’t capture at all what the sky really looked like. I’m disappointed about that.

Photo of totality by my friend Anna. The sky was a bit brighter than this in person, but this captures roughly what the moon/sun looked like.

the only thing I can say I remember for sure is that I was astonished at how enormous it was. the pictures don’t do it justice at all. to see something that high up in the sky, clearly so far from you but clearly so enormous, covering such a large portion of the sky – it was bewildering. the other thing that pictures don’t capture is the full three dimensional multisensory experience. it was dark and cold, it was breezy and dewy, you could hear the nighttime chirping of the crickets, everyone around you was just as bewildered, hundreds of people cheering and clapping. I’m sure there was much more I didn’t even have a chance to take in, because of how overwhelming and brief it was.

but there’s a different moment I do remember vividly: when the sun started reappearing. it started as a very sharp, very very bright dot in the corner of the black hole. like a star. I guess it makes sense because the sun is so freaking bright, even just that tiniest sliver will immediately appear to our eyes as this burst of light from a tiny hole. it started as this bursting hole, and the crowd cheered, and then the sun pretty quickly went back to being just a very bright ray of light. you can’t ever see the crescent with your bare eyes; it just looks like a slightly less bright sun.

I think this is what makes totality such a wildly different experience from even a 99% partial eclipse. when you’re at 99%, the sky just gets darker and the air gets colder. but what you see in the sky is still a sun – a very bright circle of light that’s hard to look at and which is “diffusing” light around it. but once you get totality, there is no longer any sun at all. the moon is completely blocking your view of it. when you look through the eclipse glasses at totality, you see nothing. there is no sun. it is an astonishing difference.

all that said, I didn’t come away as astonished as I had hoped. or rather, I think what I wanted from it is a feeling of clarity and ease and wonder and bewilderment. and you know I think I did get all those things, and yet I somehow still wanted more. I wanted it to last longer, I wanted it to happen again, I wanted to able to capture it better with my camera. I guess in the end what disappointed me was the fact that it had to end.

I don’t feel like my life has been changed, and yet I also feel like something important happened yesterday, like that moment was not the end of the story, that it was really just an opening for some more profound and transformative experience yet to come. like I still think back to that moment, and feel a sense of trepidation and confusion. there is something I’m trying to figure out about what happened. as if part of the experience has been locked away in my memory, outside my conscious access, but it’s there, and eventually it’ll come back to me. and only then will it be resolved – maybe in a dream, maybe on a quiet afternoon, maybe in another glance at the night sky decades in the future.

Cover photo by my friend Anna.

PS I highly recommend checking out this twitter thread of photos and videos of the eclipse.