Those Who Walk Alone At Night

Chapter One- The Sleepless. (Ode to Meaning.)

Qween found that the street she walked, in the dead of night, in spite of the electric lights and sidewalks dipped in caramel yellow streetlights, which offered no company, seemed alien to her. It was strange, because, of all the sequestered streets, where pubs closed late and the distance from the 24-hour convenience stores became so much that the chiming of the door opening could not be heard, this was the one she perused the most often.

The street that her sneakers clacked against with every step was slanted and made of rows upon rows of bricks, all planted next to each other like a cement carpet and left to grow weeds through the lines of mortar left between each patch of cobblestone.

The storefronts box her in on each side, ahead of her in the slothful walk up the hill, and well the lights keep them illuminated from the outside, the windows are open gorges where the darkness could be solid mass and no one would be able to tell. Occasionally there would be a gap between where one building dropped off and the next began, creating little alleys and hidey-holes for trash to converge and bikes to be propped against the shadow-chilled walls to hide from theft.

The night's chosen melody created a strange echoing of its stillness, and the absence of people reached down from the dusk-painted, starless, moonless, sky and warmed her skin softly. She was not so sorrowful to cause a storm. Bats swoop down in search of food, sometimes flying over the strip of sky painted overhead between the two parallel lines of civilization.

She passed the public bookshop, really the only library in town, or the world, where the word's 'Nature's Bookshop' had been cut out and lettered against the window of the door in gold tint, and was reminded of the stack of books piled up on her bedside table.

Entering the somnambulant town from the countryside of rolling fields beyond its boundaries in the day, one slowly forgot that the streets were built upon earth, and that concrete underfoot had once been hills. But, at night, in the empty streets, lacking the commuters and buzzing of traffic, one could smell the lily field from miles away in the air, and the sloping of roads are shaped by forgotten streams and slowly ascending mounts of the earth.

Yes, it was one of many streets she wondered in a lost haze, but in the darkness, the familiar and routine storefronts acquire a subtly different form, leaving her doing no more than her best to guess their history. Prehistoric landscapes seem more palpable beneath the pavements of the city on nights like this, as they always have.

It is in this half-familiar environment that she admires the way the night itself remains ominous, threatening; hanging over her shoulder like a crow that you can not shake of, lest risk the wrath of the claws it adorns like jewelry. Old, tangy and sourly rusting fears of the dark trouble her occasionally, but tonight she feels no more than the silent appreciation of this second city which exists outside of time.

It gave her the absurd sense of not knowing her own identity and allowed her to build herself from the thoughts the night lured into her head.