Because the night

The darkness is thick, almost palpable, something you can dive into and that will swallow you whole. Moving through the soft thrill of being awake while others are not, avoid the glowing pools of orange beneath the streetlights and begin your quiet flight from this hub of sleeping human life, upwards and outwards. You can feel the headlamp tight around your forehead but leave it off, preferring to be as invisible as you are blind. It is a race against time, to escape as far as you can before dawn catches you redhanded, a self proclaimed outcast searching for a world in the halflight.

On clear cold nights, the only sound that of moonlight glistening, it is not hard to see shadows come alive or the man in the moon wink. When seeing is believing, believing makes it so and the desires we have when no one is watching can be flung deep into the whirling stillness between the stars. Dance with your demons untill sunrise, then the days unfailingly claim you with a strange, unreal quality and you are left with the feeling of having lost something you never quite found.

The payback for getting up early comes when the energy of the spooky, dark places drains from your body, when you suddenly realize that you have been staring into space for far too long, not seeing, or pour boiling water over your fingers instead of into the tea cup. You get on with whatever it is you do in your respectable daily life, comforted by the memory of having been alone in the dark.