I think I’m stuck in a time loop.
I always stare out at the setting sun.
Every day, I see the same ball of light before me.
The sky doesn’t have to choose between the four bottles of paint I keep on my desk at home.
I don’t even know some of the colors the sky turns are colors until I see them there.
Well, I’ve seen things that are red,
Things that are pink and orange,
But in the sky, the colors are arranged in such a way,
That they all start to fade into each other,
Creating something that I barely have words to describe.
The sunset is a contrast to the grey stone beneath my feet.
I stand on the edge of a cliff,
The ocean stretching on for miles in front of me,
And miles of bare stone, hot from sitting in the sun all day, behind my back.
I see my shadow, cast on the ground.
I can tell that I am holding my head high, because of how my shadow looks.
Even though my shadow doesn’t have any eyes,
I know its gaze is strong,
Unmoved, even by the waves which I can hear crashing against the bottom of the cliff face far below,
Slowly eating away at it.
The way my shadow stands reflects that gaze.
Because of how my shirt bunches up, if you were to see my dark silhouette, but not me, you would think I carry a sword on my back.
I look at my shadow, and I see a hero staring back at me.
It’s strange, because even though it is my own shadow, when I see it, for a split second, I see someone else.
“Help me,” I whisper to the hero,
“Across the ocean, there’s a beautiful city,
I wanted to live there,
But it’s crumbling.  
Now is just the right time.
I can build a boat, and the city’s just the right distance away,
So that we’ll get there exactly at sunrise.
Then, you’ll be cast behind me like you are now.”  
The ground beneath my feet always crumbles away, then,
And I fall towards the sea.
I feel the cold wind blowing off of the water, and just before I hit the surface, I notice my shadow is still cast on the cliff face.
It whispers something so softly, it’s voice could be the wind,
But somehow I know that the words are the words of a shadow.
“But I have no hands to wield a sword.”
Then, I open my eyes.
I’m lying in bed, and I’m staring at the drawing on my wall,
Depicting a hero, with a stony gaze,
Who’s a part of a fantasy world, which I had sketched out around her.
Then, every morning, I look down at my hands.
My shadow is sort of like the universe’s black and white pencil sketch of me,
Or maybe it’s the other way around.
Maybe when I drew the hero, I was sketching myself.  
Maybe I draw my shadow,
Because every day, I realize that there’s no shadow of a hero, without a hero to cast it. 
Every day I think that,
And every day, I wake up long after dawn. 
Every day, I think of the sunrise and the twilight when I see my shadow,
But during each one of the Earth’s rotations, when I look in the mirror I notice how the way I stand reflects my gaze.
I’m glad that I don’t have to set my alarm too early.