Lovely Night
Monday, March 16th, 2009
Toward the party lights and the muffled music that comes clear when a bar door is pushed open, the gathering places are full with warm bodies and cold faces. I walk down the dark sidewalks and at intervals the neon signs hung in bars scorch my face red, the sting as sharp as the cold wind’s burn in the fading night. I am going to count sidewalk cracks and watch where I step, study faces studying me, pretend not to notice, pause at crosswalks, look one way and step into traffic, let the beams flash on my belt metal and my coat buttons. I am searching for something in the night and don’t know what it is, but it’s lovely, and it’s in the fresh-air privacy that is easily found late Saturday into Sunday.
Glass doors pull closed and swing open. The last workers in the clothiers come out from behind the displays and registers, the jewelry counters and stock rooms, wearing high boots to the knees and low heels. They are just a silent note on the night I’m tracking, following through on the usual formula for bringing the work day to an end for their employers.
They methodically go about the end and the process makes feel as though I am a lonely simpleton out for a casual walk, not a tracker and recorder of Saturday night. Let me finish this strange prayer in peace, my way, privately. The skies could open up and let love flood over me into the ground’s open pores, seeping in with the reality.
Bare tree branches about to bud dangle and sway over gutters, dark against the purple sky, and everything looks like death, the end. I feel comfortable here in the world where I’m unknown. How glorious it feels to step in the businesses and step out on my schedule, accomplishing little but that not the point, the point only to walk, to breathe in public air, to window shop on humanity and know that half these people are less interesting to me, the others far more compelling, but none so deep, none so lost at this moment, this very moment.
My life was never on the brink, just over the cliff it went one day and the drop was a steep one. To the bottom, then exploding in bits, a big KA-POW comic book burst, and it stabs like the points on the jagged edging.
