The night



The night comes with terrors, with shadow and darkness, and monsters untold. We have created artificial lights to illuminate our cities, to dispel the ancient fear of the world's darkness, to ward off being blind.

The night holds secrets, cradling criminals and hookers, broken dreams, abandonment, and illicit trysts. It is the time of shady dealings, of gunshots in the dark, of stealing babes away from mothers, of pillaging villages and wartime desperation, and of utter hopelessness in prisons.

The night is a time of silence, when we fully hear the great heartbeat of the city and the rumble of its arteries, the howls and songs of its citizens, the fatigue of the day slowly being replaced by the winding down of furious men and women whose hopes and resiliency are equaled only by the drudgery of the calendar going on and on in society running fast to its own oblivion.

The night is a time for forgiveness, when we finally see our creator in the eyes and tell him we forgive him for his love, which is terrible and awful to behold. It is the time when we look at creation in all its nakedness, without redemption of sunlight, and realize that God is the saddest of us all.

The night is comfortable, it is a time for books and tea, for feeling small and curled up, and as big and as vastly naked as the universe. It is when we realize that we are at home, alone, and going nowhere, except to sleep and dream - dreams which do not make us escape our humanity, but show us its full irrationality and fleetingness, surely to die tomorrow with the dawn's first lick of light.

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