4.2b

She was all out of breath from climbing and she still lost her breath looking at the sunset on the rocks. Her hat was fashionable for the desert and her camera bag was slung around her elbow. She looked like she fit. We were sitting with our backs up to the rock, still warm from the day, but made cold from the wind, and I turned to her as though to say "This sight is big enough for both of us," but all I said was "Hello!"
"Hey," she said. "It's so beautiful. Is this it?"
I could see a man climb up behind her, impatience slapped slip-shod on his face, no true attempt to hide it. "This is Delicate Arch."
"Oh, I know. I mean--is this sunset? When is it?"
I looked down at my watch. 7:35pm. "We've got about five or six more minutes until the sun is really gone. You're welcome to share our vantage point." The pink rocks below were really being blasted now with a violent red light from across the sky, and the arch itself was cutting a thin shadow through the light. I pulled out my phone and took a third picture, a fourth. I put my phone away again. And then, the scene shifted. Everyone was standing just where they had been, the mountains behind were just as they were before. But our little alcove of wind-shorn rocks was suddenly less sharp than it was before, the colors lost where a breath ago they had been brilliant. "Ah!" I said. Then, quieter: "That was it."
Weston turned to me. "What was?"
"Sunset." The scene from our view was losing its luster--the crown of the continent had abandoned us and moved on further West, a thin strip of brilliant sunlight playing across a thousand miles of dying day. Ours was now a dusk beauty of pink-rimmed clouds and foreign desert noises coming awake.
She had her phone up, taking pictures. He touched her shoulder. "I guess, if you say that's it?"
"That's it."
"Well, it's been nice meeting you." He took her elbow and guided her from the unknown arch, the secluded keyhole that pokes through the rock just opposite the most famous uncut stone structure in the world. No one else intruded. Why would they? The view had moved on. Yet we stayed, to look for a time at nothing in particular, to sigh and to wonder just what else we had missed that night.

Every choice leads to but one moment. Every choice is death to infinities more.