Tomorrow is the most defining day of a tragically heavy year; as I write this, I don’t yet know what will happen at the courthouse.

The Commonwealth Attorney’s offices closed at four. There won’t be any updates coming. I won’t know until I’m in the room. It could be an ending, the closing of a chaotic chapter I’ve been living inside for months. It could also be a beginning, another tether to stretch out another chapter and stretch me. I’ve prayed for one. I may get the other. I’d name it as a worry, but in the same breath I’d be surrendering it to God. That’s the only thing I know to do right now.

I’ve been thinking, not rationally or poetically, really. It’s the strange, suspended way you think on the night before an uncertain reckoning. My mind reaches for what it knows by heart… sunrises and sunsets. I spend an hour in them, respectively, then I dive in and edit them, trying to mimic in a photograph what God does at first and last light. All of it is a gift, the experience of watching glory transform the horizon and savoring it with a photography passion.

In my manual photography ventures, I’ve been leaning into leaving the shutter open longer before the sun rises and after the sun sets. You’ll find me at the water’s edge early and late. I’ve learned to leave the shutter open longer to get those deep hues without ISO washed-noise. The settings I used twenty minutes after last light wherever I chased the sunset is typically just right twenty minutes before first light at Yorktown Beach. They are not the same creatures. They do different things. It’s why writers love to use them as metaphors to explain life’s trajectory, the setting sun juxtaposed against the rising one.

A sunrise is a beginning. A sunset is an ending. Right? We treat them as opposites, one hopeful and one wistful, and most of the time that works. This summer, however, taught me it isn’t that simple, and the sky taught me itself. A few weeks ago, the wildfire smoke came back and turned the sun a deep, eerie red, and it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever stood under. It was also, I knew, beautiful because something far away was burning. A sun can rise over destruction. Its setting can be a mercy. The beautiful and the hard don’t sit neatly on opposing sides of the horizon. Sometimes, they’re the very same light. It returned again this weekend, and I welcomed the red sun at dawn and dusk, refracted grief to keep me company.

So maybe it doesn’t matter as much as I think whether tomorrow is a sunrise or a sunset. Both can be survived. Both can even be beautiful in the terrible way the red sun was beautiful.

Beneath all this, something comforts me. I have wept so much this week in anticipation of tomorrow. I have never once wept at sunrise or sunset.

The water is the one place the fear can’t follow me. I can carry this dread into the rest of my hours, and I do, surrendering it in prayer when I’m mindful. Still, when I’m standing at the pier with the light coming up or at the edge of some creek at dusk with my camera, the tears do not come. There is no room for them. There’s only the light, me, and a God who keeps appearing in all His glory at the edge of the water whether or not I feel Him coming.

A friend sent me a song on Saturday that’s been the soundtrack of my life ever since, on repeat, a song about worshiping the light and letting it turn you to gold. It says, in someone else’s words, exactly what the people who’ve stood beside me at the water this summer have watched happen to me. I came broken. The light has been remaking me, day by day, whether or not I understood it was happening. The song casts the sun as something to be adored and us as the canvas its glory is painted across. I worship the source of the light, a God who remains present in shadows and darkness.

No matter how the Lord answers this prayer, I know one thing for certain.

Regardless of what happens in that room tomorrow, there is another sunrise coming. Tomorrow night is Back to School Night, and I will stand in my classroom and meet my next batch of students, the way I have nineteen times before. The day does not end in the reckoning room. There’s a whole other beginning to drive directly to from the courthouse, one where I get to be who I’ve always been, doing the good work I was made to do.

There’s another sunrise coming. And honestly, there have been so many already.

I walked into a faculty meeting last week and my new assistant principal told me she’d seen me on the news. WTKR called me a “really good photographer.” Another sunrise.

My principal moved a meeting into my classroom, and afterward she told me teachers had been complimenting how I’d set it up, and asked if I’d lead a training next year on the way I run my room. Another sunrise.

I stepped into a new role this year that hands me a camera and sends me around the school to capture what’s happening in it, and doing it, I feel like myself again, like the yearbook teacher I was for twelve years. Another sunrise.

Nancy and Susan, friends from Gloucester Point sunsets, spent an evening playing with the word sunchaser, designing me a custom license plate so I can carry that name with me everywhere I drive. Another sunrise. It’s also proof I came to the water to survive and left having found my sanctuary, complete with friends that have made this summer of solitude priceless.

Last night, I ended up at Riverview Farm Park, and who was standing at the overlook but Jerry, white goatee behind his tripod. I’ve studied his photographs all summer. He’s the one who introduced me to Poquoson as a spot to chase the sunset, who cheered me on from a distance before we’d ever met in person. I recognized him instantly and hugged him like the old friend he somehow already was. Another photographer was there too, and the three of us stood shooting the same sky side by side. Since there were three of us framing the same sunset, I climbed over the rail and went down to the beach beneath the boardwalk to find an angle no one else was taking, and I shot the two of them from below, small against all that light. Afterward we walked the trail and talked into the twilight, three people bound by one common wonder. At one point Jerry asked me what my next thing is. Sunrises, I said. Sunsets. And next? Lightning. Another sunrise, on the night I needed one most.

Schools are rumor mills. Rumors make reputations. Last year, I was Mrs. Ramos. The teacher who got strangled. Who struggled to love well from an empty cup. Who cried when people hugged her because kindness kindled grief.

This year, I am Ms. Palma again. The tree that bends in the hurricane and does not break.

My principal called me by my first name this morning, just “Laura Joy,” and something in me stood up straighter because I think this is the year I finally get to live up to the joy part of it. Every time I hear, “Ms. Palma,” it’s like a ship that had been listing for a long time quietly righting itself in the water. The divorce isn’t even final yet, but I am not his. He has not held me in nearly seven months. God does it daily. Embraces me with a sky. Encourages me with a heron. Whispers in gentle waves. Roars in the wind. Soothes with rain. I feel the warmth of the sun grow, changing the horizon and changing me.

I don’t know what tomorrow holds, an ending or a beginning. A sunset or a sunrise. I do know that the sunrise requires a sunset before it will make another appearance. I’ll show up to the light, ready or not. I’ll let it do its slow work on me. Whatever the morning takes, the evening will still bring me a room full of new faces and another chance to be exactly who I’ve become.

There is always another sunrise coming. And another sunset. When you worship the Light, you learn to appreciate what God’s doing in both.