Saturday, again.

Saturday’s sunset was spectacular. Every one of us was sad to see it going to sleep, but its departure was a beauty that only the sky could produce. We looked at one another, knowing that we were sharing that bittersweet ending to our holiday. We had to fly home the next day and none of us wanted to. We were in Lake Garda and the weather had been glorious. We’d lounged by the pool in surroundings that bordered on the divine, and the following day, we had no choice but to go back to the dull, dark UK. Remote weather-watching told us that rain awaited us upon our return.

Endings are always sad, no matter how much you have anticipated them, but they’re so much worse whenever you’ve been dreading them since the very beginning. I knew from the moment we touched down on Italian soil that I wouldn’t want to leave. We’d been spoilt over the two-week period we’d spent there. We were treated like royalty by the hotel we’d been staying in. We hadn’t had to lift a finger, unless it was for something pleasurable, like going for a swim. The head of the sun was vanishing over the horizon, and then it was gone; until it bounced back again. It reared its head over the horizon again in a moment so foreign I had the impression the world must be ending. Nothing else could explain such a phenomenon.

At first, I thought I was hallucinating; not in the conventional sense, but I thought I was seeing what I wanted to see. Your mind is capable of creating the most improbable things whenever it is desperate enough to see them. But no – the rest of my group started to gasp and then to scream. It was horrifying, even though it amazed us. You can witness the most beautiful sight on Earth, but if it’s unnatural to you, it can still leave you with a feeling of horror.

The sun continued to rise, until the round fireball was wholly visible again. Joshua kept using God’s name in vain. The others were either silent or screaming; the two most common reactions to shock. Isabelle looked into my eyes, deeper than she ever had before. “What?” she mouthed at me, as if I could know the answer. I couldn’t think of a thing to say to her. I almost expected the world to end that second. Wasn’t that the type of thing that came right before the apocalypse?

The sun was moving upwards. We were frozen in time, and I had no sense of how long we’d been watching it for. I knew it was moving at the typical speed of a sunrise, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from it. I’d never watched a sunrise so closely before. It’s funny the things you take for granted whenever you know they happen every day. We were witnessing a once in a lifetime event – whether it ended in our demise or not. It was one of those news-worthy moments we’d be interviewed about later, if we even survived it.

We started to talk in reverse - each word we’d spoken before the sun had set but arranged into inverted sentences. I couldn’t stop myself, no matter what I did. Cole had a coughing fit that he’d had moments before sunset. He’d choked on nothing, and we’d all laughed about it, but the laughter came before the cough this time. We were acting in ways that felt like they’d already been coded into time. We had no control over our actions. We were doing it all over again, but in reverse.

The sun was climbing while we talked. Maybe if you will something to happen enough, it can come into being. I’d wished all day long that Saturday would never end, that we could redo the whole thing – and here we were. It wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind. If we could stall time, would we? That’s an important question to ask ourselves. In theory, yes, but was the reality of it different? I tried to ponder that, but it was hard to allow space for my own thoughts when we were acting everything out again, back to front. Isabelle was talking about the sunset, but with jumbled words, it was hard to make sense of what she was saying, even though I’d heard it all before. Her regret echoed over the quiet Italian sunset (that was really a sunrise.) The sky was gradually lightening, and the sun was returning to its uppermost point. It would take hours to get there, but I could see where it was going. It was all becoming completely predictable. The day in reverse was different than it had been the first time around. We got to our feet and walked back towards the hotel, away from our viewpoint.

Isabelle was talking about how full she was. “full so am I,” she said. “?much so eat I did How”

“?do to meant you are else What .buffet eat can you all an It’s” answered Cole.

Trying to reorder the words, to make them make sense, to find out that we’d already heard them a couple of hours earlier, was disappointing work.

I thought I’d give anything on Earth to have that indescribably perfect day all over again, and it had landed in my lap, like a wish from a genie’s lamp, delivered in a way that could never live up to the original version. I was angry with myself for ever entertaining the idea that it could. The allure of the unknown was tempting me, even if it meant going back to the greyness of the UK. The weather might have been predictable there, but at least nothing else was. I wondered if it was some sort of test – to make me realise what I’d had before I wished the future away; like a moral lesson provided by a preachy children’s book. But I didn’t have the key to return to normality. Was it just a lesson in the power of the present, or was it science fiction? Only time would tell.