In the night

The day has gone and all that we were during the sunlit hours has gone too, temperaments and dispositions change colors and hues are chameleon like as we adopt our night-time persona. Another page of history been written and filed away and I believe that the person who we are during daylight also goes away. The magic of the hours after dark are painted on just as the robes of the night adorn us and we may act a little differently and we may have slightly altered behavioral traits in our personalities and make up. Like the ebb and flow of the tides change the weight of the waters upon the shore we also change once the sun falls below the horizon.
My daily tasks have been completed. Appointments made and kept, files created and saved and assignments are written and printed and in-trays are emptied. Work stations are switched off, draws and file cabinets secured and keys handed in.
We squeeze ourselves into the mass of humanity that spread out towards the suburbs seeking the familiarity, the comfort and security of our homes alone or to meet families and some of us peel away from the masses and call into the many attractive bars and restaurants along the way with the close company of our friends and colleagues. Like a dance of fireflies, individual office lights are extinguished from the tall towers and are replaced with exterior display lights and street lights illuminate the thoroughfares and advertising neon's help to consolidate mankind's brilliance and his continual attempts to hold back the night with the radiance of electricity arcing across artificial horizons.

The night time comes and as some of us seek relaxation or recreation, others have woken from daytime slumbers and work in the night.
Kaori is one such worker during the night and is a new friend of ours. She is a girl who shies away from the light of the sun and from the attention and smiles of those who would know her more. She generally keeps herself to herself and she claims to have run away from the past, from lives and loves and people she once knew and of course knows deep inside that we can never escape our own shadows but is she hiding from someone or something? Whatever lies there beyond her personal veils, she maintains not only an obvious distance from it but she has also constructed a barrier cutting off contact from all those who perhaps came close to her many years ago. She now works as a night manager for a small hotel. You may know the type I mean, it's a small hotel with hardly any windows at all and it is one where customers never meet the staff. Customers may rent the 'themed' rooms from the automatic vendors in the front and stay for a short rest of a single hour or stay for a three hour rest but it's one where cheap overnight stays are not tendered until 10pm. She has a small room in the back opposite her small office where we sat drinking tea (that's gin and tea) and eating small rice-cakes, illuminated by the screens of several video feeds of the main entrance, the staff door and the corridors.
We met her at the Mars along with a 'current' friend of hers and we have shared drinks and interesting discussions over the last couple of months and the invitation last night for a couple more drinks at her place seemed interesting. The hours passed quickly in her delightful company as we exchanged stories of life and I think we just forgot to sleep because we were so enthralled by her company. Eventually we had to leave though and it seemed a little amusing to call a taxi and have it pick us up from the back of a love hotel but he'd probably picked up many customers from those discreet doors. Perhaps though the only strangeness he saw last night was that we both exited at the same destination instead of separate locations for parting couples.

The last of the darkness enveloped the city like a fine film of plastic. Garbage trucks begin to appear on the streets and as they collected their loads and moved on, people who spent the night in the various parts of the city began to take their place, walking towards subway stations intent upon catching those first trains that will take them out to the suburbs, like schools of fish swimming upstream. People who have finally finished the work they must do all night, young people who are tired from playing all night: whatever the differences in their situations, both types are equally reticent. Even the young couple who stopped at the drinks vending machine, tightly pressed against each other, had no more words for each other. Instead, what they soundlessly shared was the lingering warmth of their bodies.
The new day is almost here but the old one is still dragging its heavy robes in a lazy fashion. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at the river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend. I am unable to tell for sure which side of the day-night divide or which world contains my center, my being, my essence.


As the sun peeked over the eastern skyline the cycle had been completed, all disturbances had been resolved, perplexities have been concealed and things have been returned to their original state. Around us, cause and effect join hands once more and composites and divisions maintain their equilibrium. Everything finally unfolds and tangles and wrinkles straighten out. Such are the shadowed and hidden places that seem to open secret portals in the darkness of the interval between midnight and the time that the sky grows light. None of the principles of daylight have any effect there. No one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people up or where or when they will spit them out. The night is her own mistress and plays by a different rule book.

The day brings a different reality, one of stark contrast from the hidden world of the night. The day seems oppressive by confined constraint and regulation when compared to the freedoms and indulgence of the darkness.
The aromas of lunch wafted into our room as we woke. We showered and it seems we had slept through the new beginning of the new day and it also we feel that perhaps too eagerly we wait for the shadows to fall again and our preference may be for neon light rather than sunlight.